Nvidia is one of the world’s biggest computer chip companies, best known for its line of graphics processing units or GPUs. Although the firm had its start in the world of consumer gaming, in recent years it’s grown into a true tech titan with diverse investments in self-driving cars, cloud computing, supercomputing, and artificial intelligence. The parallel processing power of Nvidia’s GPUs has proven to be particularly good at machine learning tasks, and its chips are in high demand not only from AI researchers but any business with an interest in artificial intelligence. From 2015 onwards, Nvidia’s share price grew sharply, allowing the company to make some key acquisitions, including UK chip designer ARM, which it announced it would purchase in September 2020 for $40 billion. Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, who is currently the firm’s CEO. Known for his leather jackets and upbeat corporate presentations, Huang is a familiar figure to anyone interested in tech.
After a previously-announced $100 billion deal went “on ice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported, Nvidia is nearing a $30 billion equity investment as part of a larger funding round, the Financial Times reports. The investment might be tied up as soon as this weekend.
Starting on Thursday, GeForce Now users can stream games directly on Amazon Fire TV devices, including a few new arrivals coming this week like Reanimal and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Fire TVs join a growing list of platforms with support for Nvidia GeForce Now, which even includes Linux.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, that is, re: the Nvidia Shield TV, likely the most supported Android gadget ever at over a decade. Nvidia’s Andrew Bell tells Ars Technica a new model isn’t in active development, but hints at what he’d add (like AV1 and YouTube HDR). He says Nvidia doesn’t profit off its Netflix button, BTW.
The deal, announced in September, is “on ice,” according to The Wall Street Journal, though there are apparently still talks about a deal of some kind:
Now, the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership, some of the people said. The latest discussions, they said, include an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars as part of OpenAI’s current funding round.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Nvidia promised to deliver a native GeForce Now Linux app earlier this month, and it’s now releasing a beta today. The native Linux app is a highly requested feature for GeForce Now, especially as subscribers have had to rely on unofficial apps or browser tweaks to get access to the service.
The beta is available for Ubuntu 24.04 and newer starting today, and Nvidia will expand support to additional Linux distributions soon.
Nvidia is launching Remix Logic today, a new RTX Remix update that allows modders to add dynamic graphics effects inside games.
You’d normally need source code or engine access to do this, but Remix Logic will let modders easily control weather systems and add new gameplay systems in classic games. It’s available today through Nvidia’s desktop app.
The 25 percent tariff announced on Wednesday only applies to chips imported into the US then exported to other countries, as the New York Times reports. While it won’t apply to chips imported for use in the US, it will let the government collect some of the earnings from sales of AI chips to China.
[The New York Times]
Sales of Nvidia’s AI chips to customers in China will be approved on a “case-by-case basis,” as Bloomberg reports. But the chips shipped to China can be “no more than 50% of the total products made for the US market,” and can’t create a shortage in the US.
Biden’s national security adviser tells The Verge why the Trump-Nvidia chip deal could be catastrophic.
The chipmaker is making a big bet on self-driving cars. And it’s making quick progress too.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang brought a pair of adorable BDX droids on stage while speaking about the future of AI and robotics. These little bots probably can’t put a towel inside a washing machine, but they sure are cute!
Huang is set to share “what’s next in AI” during a CES presentation at 4PM ET. You can watch the event from the livestream embedded below or by heading directly to YouTube.
Nvidia won’t be announcing its rumored RTX 50 Super GPUs at CES today, but it still has some “features, games, apps, and partner products” to unveil. A GeForce On Twitch stream will start at 9PM PT / 12AM ET tonight, and if leaks are anything to go by it sounds like DLSS 4.5 could be on the menu.
CNBC reports Nvidia isn’t buying all of Groq, which has inference AI tech that IBM’s CEO recently told us “looks like it’ll be 10x cheaper” than GPUs.
Nvidia’s getting a non-exclusive license, and members of the team, like Google TPU creator and Groq CEO Jonathan Ross, and former Autonomic CEO Sunny Madra.
In the spring, Reuters broke the news that Nvidia and Broadcom were testing Intel’s 18A process for chip production, but in a profile today of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, the outlet now says Nvidia’s test has ended, regardless of their new $5 billion deal.
The report doesn’t say why, but in October, Intel CFO David Zinsner said 18A yields were “not where we need them to be to drive the appropriate level of margins,” and that it could be 2026 or 2027 before that changes.
Active paid GeForce Now members who signed up before 2025 had been exempt, but starting January 1st, 2026, the cap is in place for them, too. Founders members will continue to have unlimited playtime, Nvidia says.
Nvidia has built an empire on circular deals for chips. Can anything knock it down?
The White House is planning to give Nvidia the green light to begin exporting its H200 AI GPU chips to China, according to reports from Semafor and the WSJ. As noted by the WSJ, the H200 chip is more powerful than the scaled-down H20 GPU that China has cracked down on, but it still doesn’t rival Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs.
In the story I wrote about CoreWeave, analyst Gil Luria told me the company has “to keep borrowing more and more because they spend more money than they can get, structurally. They have to continue to borrow to pay interest on the last loan.” Aren’t you glad Nvidia helped them go public?
Huang said this during a company meeting with employees last week, Fortune reports. Apparently some managers have told Nvidia employees to use less AI? Not on Huang’s watch. He said he wants AI to automate “every task” that can be automated with AI – and employees shouldn’t worry about AI taking their jobs in the process.
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Slapping an RTX 5070 onto your laptop is a big deal. It’s other parts of the Laptop 16 that falter.
