Nvidia, a tech giant already sitting comfortably as the world’s third most valuable company, has unveiled a new weapon in their fight to maintain dominance in the artificial intelligence (AI) market: a powerful new chip called the Blackwell B200. This chip promises to be a significant leap forward, even compared to Nvidia’s current top-of-the-line processors.

The new releases are an attempt by Nvidia to hold onto its place as the market leader as the demand for hardware to power new AI tools grows.

Announcing its new Blackwell chips, which will be released later this year, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said they were dramatically faster and more powerful than its predecessor.

Previously, training a detailed AI model might have taken 8,000 of Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs, and 15 megawatts of power. Now it says it can do that with just 2,000 Blackwell chips and 4 megawatts.

Nvidia’s hardware is used by many of the biggest tech firms in the world – including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta – to power their AI models.

Mr Huang said the new Blackwell chips were twice as powerful when it came to training AI models as its current generation chips, and were five times faster when it came to inference – the speed at which AI chatbots can respond to queries.

Nvidia has become the key player in AI chips in recent years, particularly as generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have taken off, seeing the firm’s market value skyrocket as a result – reaching two trillion dollars last month.

The company also unveiled new software tools to make it easier for businesses to incorporate AI tools into their work, as well as a new line of chips aimed at getting chatbots into cars, and another range to help with the creation of humanoid robots, as Nvidia looks to diversify its offerings further.

According to the businesstoday/ independent