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It’s a new world, and one that needs new data solutions.
At AI super-company Nvidia’s GTC conference on March 18, founder and CEO Jensen Huang laid out a vision for the future of “accelerated computing” in an era of automation.
“We need another way of doing computing—so that we can continue to scale so that we can continue to drive down the cost of computing, so that we can continue to consume more and more computing while being sustainable,” Huang said. “Accelerated computing is a dramatic speedup over general-purpose computing, in every single industry”
Nvidia’s new data center hardware has substantial potential, as the company explained on its blog, and is aimed at optimizing system efficiency:
NVIDIA builds the world’s most advanced AI supercomputers and at GTC unveiled its latest—a large cluster based on the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 liquid-cooled system. It consists of two racks, each containing 18 NVIDIA Grace CPUs and 36 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, connected by fourth-generation NVIDIA NVLink switches.
For Nvidia—flush with cash due to explosive 265% revenue growth year over year for the fourth quarter of 2023, making it the third most valuable company in the US—these changes involve investment. The company is looking to make its “next-gen data centers” into “AI factories,” Huang said, that exist to “generate revenues; in this case, intelligence.”
In an interview with TechCrunch, Huang likened the rise in AI-powered tech to the Industrial Revolution, when “the raw material that went into the factory was water, and the product was electricity.” Today, Huang said, “the raw material that goes in is data and electricity. What comes out of it is data tokens. The token is invisible and will be distributed all over the world. It’s very valuable.”
That sets up the AI powerhouse well for taking advantage of a burgeoning data center market, estimated at $250 billion annually.