Nvidia has taken the wraps off new products, such as artificial intelligence to better train robots and cars, souped-up gaming chips, and its first desktop computer.
At CES 2025, a major annual tech conference in Las Vegas, CEO Jensen Huang laid out how the world’s second-most valuable firm is bringing technology that powers its lucrative data centre AI chips to consumer PCs and laptops.
He also introduced what Nvidia calls Cosmos foundation models that generate photorealistic video which can be used to train robots and self-driving cars at a much lower cost than using conventional data.
By creating so-called “synthetic” training data, the models help robots and cars understand the physical world similar to the way that large language models have helped chatbots generate responses in natural language.
Users will be able to give Cosmos a text description that can be used to generate video of a world that obeys the laws of physics. This promises to be much cheaper than gathering data as it is done today such as putting cars on the road to gather video or having humans teach robots repetitive tasks.
Cosmos will be made available on an “open licence”, similar to Meta Platforms Llama 3 language models that have become widely used in the tech industry.
“We really hope Cosmos will do for the world of robotics and industrial AI what Llama 3 has done for enterprise AI,” Huang said.
Gaming chips
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya said it remained to be seen whether the robotics push would significantly boost Nvidia’s sales.
“The challenge in our view is … making the products reliable enough, cheap enough and pervasive enough to spawn credible business models,” Arya said in a note to clients. “From that perspective, robotics could remain another cool but niche opportunity such as metaverse or autonomous cars.”
Huang also unveiled new gaming chips that use Nvidia’s Blackwell technology, which has helped propel its sales in data centres.
Read: Is Broadcom the next Nvidia?
The chips, the RTX 50 series, aim to give videogames movie-like graphics, especially in a field known as “shaders”, which can help images like a ceramic teapot look more realistic by adding imperfections and fingerprint smudges to its surface.
The new chips can also help game developers generate more accurate human faces, an area where players are apt to notice even slightly unrealistic features. The chips will range in price from US$549 to $1 999, with top models arriving on 30 January and lower-tier models coming in February.
Ben Bajarin, CEO of technology consultancy Creative Strategies, said the new gaming chips should help boost Nvidia sales in the short term.
Huang also showed off its first desktop computer, called Project Digits — albeit a computer designed for computer programmers rather than regular consumers.
Costing $3 000 and running an Nvidia operating system based on Linux, it will feature the same chip at the heart of the company’s data centre offerings but paired with a central processor built with help from Taiwan’s MediaTek.
The chips will come in a smaller package that can be used by individual software developers to test their AI systems quickly. The desktop will be available in March.
Nvidia also said Japan’s Toyota will use its Orin chips and automotive operating system to power advanced driver assistance in several models. It did not give details about the models. Toyota’s shares were up 1.7% in late Tokyo trade.
Huang expects automotive hardware and software revenue of $5-billion in fiscal 2026, up from an expected $4-billion this year.
Nvidia’s stock closed at a record high of $149.43 on Monday, bringing its valuation to $3.66-trillion and making it the world’s second-most valuable listed company behind Apple. — Max Cherney and Stephen Nellis, (c) 2024 Reuters
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