In May, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that “the next industrial revolution has begun,” and AI will drive “significant productivity gains.” It looks like he’s right — industry demand for Nvidia’s next-generation AI chip, Blackwell, is through the roof.
“Blackwell is in full production, Blackwell is as planned, and the demand for Blackwell is insane,” Huang told CNBC on Thursday. “Everybody wants to have the most, and everybody wants to be first.”
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Nvidia first announced Blackwell in March and stated that it was the most powerful AI chip in the world with advanced security capabilities, better performance, and more memory. The biggest names in AI, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google, will use Blackwell to power their AI efforts.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang displays the new Blackwell GPU chip, left, and the Hopper GPU chip, right, in March 2024. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“There is currently nothing better than NVIDIA hardware for AI,” Tesla and xAI CEO Elon Musk stated, at the time.
Since the initial announcement, Blackwell has hit a few snags in production, leading to delays. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in late August that the company has fixed the issue and expects to ship “several billion dollars” worth of the chip in the fourth quarter of 2024.
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The chip costs between $30,000 to $40,000 and took $10 billion to develop.
Huang said that Nvidia has updated its platform significantly with Blackwell, and intends to continue updating it. Nvidia has increased performance by two to three times from its 2022 Hopper chip to its Blackwell chip, which Huang says increases revenue for Nvidia’s customers by two to three times.
“What we’re looking at now is the beginning of the next wave of AI, the biggest wave of AI,” Huang told CNBC. “This is really about companies around the world using AI to be more productive as their digital employees and AI agents and co-pilots and however people describe them, as well as using AI, generative AI, to revolutionize the way they build their products and the products they build.”
Huang said last month that intense demand for Nvidia’s technology and software keeps him up at night. On Wednesday, Nvidia partnered with Accenture to train 30,000 of Accenture’s employees on Nvidia’s technology.