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<\/div>The Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip<\/p>\n
Nvidia<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
Nvidia has unveiled a \u201csuperchip\u201d for training artificial intelligence models, the most powerful it has ever produced. The US computing firm, which has recently rocketed in value to become the world\u2019s third-largest company, hasn\u2019t yet revealed the cost of its new chips, but observers expect a high price tag that will make them accessible to only a few organisations.<\/p>\n
The chips were announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a press conference in San Jose, California, on 18 March. He showed off the company\u2019s new Blackwell B200 graphics processing units (GPUs), each of which has 208 billion transistors \u2013 the tiny switches at the heart of modern computing devices \u2013 compared with the 80 billion transistors of Nvidia\u2019s current-generation Hopper chips. He also revealed the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which combines two of the B200 chips.<\/p>\n
\u201cBlackwell is just going to be an amazing system for generative AI,\u201d said Huang. \u201cAnd in the future, data centres are going to be thought of as AI factories.\u201d<\/p>\n
GPUs have become coveted hardware for any organisation seeking to train large AI models. During AI chip shortages<\/a> in 2023, Elon Musk spoke of GPUs being \u201cconsiderably harder to get than drugs\u201d and some academic researchers without access bemoaned being \u201cGPU poor\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nvidia claims its Blackwell chips can deliver 30 times performance improvement when running generative AI services based on large language models compared to Hopper GPUs, all while using 25 times less energy.<\/p>\n It says that whereas OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4 large language model required approximately 8000 Hopper GPUs and 15 megawatts of power to perform 90 days of training, the same AI training could be done using just 2000 Blackwell GPUs consuming 4 megawatts of power.<\/p>\n The company has not yet revealed the cost of the Blackwell GPUs but the price tag is likely to reach eyewatering levels, given that the Hopper GPUs already cost between $20,000 and $40,000 apiece. This focus on developing more powerful and expensive chips means they \u201cwill only be accessible to a select few organizations and countries,\u201d says Sasha Luccioni<\/a> at Hugging Face, a company that develops tools for sharing AI code and data sets. \u201cApart from the environmental impacts of this already very energy-intensive tech, this is truly a Marie Antoinette, \u2018let them eat cake\u2019 moment for the AI community,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The electricity demand from data centre<\/a> expansions \u2013 driven in large part by the generative AI boom<\/a> \u2013 is expected to double by 2026, reaching level with the energy consumption of Japan today.. That can come with steep carbon emissions costs as well if those data centres supporting AI training continue relying on fossil fuel<\/a> power plants.<\/p>\n Global demand for GPUs has also meant geopolitical complications for Nvidia amidst growing tensions and strategic competition between the US and China<\/a>. The US government has implemented export controls on advanced chip technologies to delay China\u2019s AI development efforts in a move that it describes as vital to US national security \u2013 and that has forced Nvidia to create less powerful versions of its chips for Chinese customers.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n<\/section><\/div>\n