(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp., the largest U.S. chipmaker by market value, announced new products and technology aimed at continuing its rapid growth in artificial intelligence processing.
Most Read from Bloomberg
Graphics chips based on the new “Hopper” design will debut later this year, the company said at an online company event Tuesday. The processors are created with as many as 80 billion transistors and — when paired with new connecting chips — will massively speed up the development of software that understands human speech and does genomic research.
Nvidia shares gained as much as 1.9% to $272.38 in New York. They had been down 9.1% this year through Monday’s close, in line with a broader slide for chip stocks.
Under Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, Nvidia has parlayed its dominance of graphics chips prized by computer gamers into a lucrative position in server technology. The company supplies chips to the owners of some of the world’s largest data centers, which use the technology to power the artificial intelligence software needed to make sense of the growing flood of digital information.
Huang saw the opportunity early and tasked Nvidia’s engineers with adapting its product to become crucial to this growing type of computing. The company branched out with new types of semiconductors, computer systems, software and services to keep it ahead of the competition.
It’s been six weeks since Nvidia walked away from a plan to acquire Arm Ltd., an influential U.K. chip designer, from SoftBank Group Corp. The $40 billion deal would have been the largest in chip industry history, but it faced regulatory opposition around the world, prompting Nvidia to refocus on its existing businesses.
The Hopper technology, named for computer science pioneer Grace Hopper, is Nvidia’s latest offering. It contains circuitry specifically designed to run so-called Transformer machine learning models, which are used to improve the way that machines understand and interpret human speech. Hopper will also better link with other chips, allowing it to remove some of the bottlenecks caused by transferring huge data sets between parts of a computer. Nvidia will rely on contract manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to make the chips.
Alibaba Cloud, Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS, Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure are among the large companies that will adopt the new chips, Nvidia said. In addition, computer makers such as Dell Technologies Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. will offer machines based on the silicon.
Nvidia also announced the availability of the Grace CPU Superchip, its brand name for a new central processing unit for high-end data-center computing. That product is its initial foray into the bigger market for CPUs — a field where Intel Corp. technology remains dominant but is facing greater pressure from new entrants.
(Update with share reaction in third paragraph.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
Add Comment