Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talks about the Project Digits personal AI supercomputer for researchers and students during a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 6, 2025. AI-infused gadgets, robots and vehicles after once again will be on display will compete for attention at the Consumer Electronics Show as behind-the-scenes sellers look for ways to deal with tariffs threatened by US President-elect Donald Trump. The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) officially begins in Las Vegas on January 7, 2025, but the previous days were full of product announcements. (Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP) (Photo: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
Patrick T. Fallon | Af | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got a rock star welcome at CES in Las Vegas this week thanks to artificial intelligence boom this made the chipmaker the second most valuable company in the world.
On Monday, during his nearly two-hour keynote to kick off the annual conference, Huang packed the 12,000-seat arena, drawing comparisons to the way Steve Jobs revealed products at Apple events.
Huang ended with an Apple-style trick: a surprise product reveal. He showed off one of Nvidia's server racks and, using stage magic, lifted a much smaller version that looked like a tiny cube of a computer.
“It's an AI supercomputer,” Huang said, putting on an alligator leather jacket. “It supports the entire Nvidia AI stack. All Nvidia software runs on it.”
Huang said the computer is called Project Digits and is based on a relative of the Grace Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) that currently power the most advanced AI server clusters. The GPU is paired with ARMbased on the Grace central processing unit (CPU). Nvidia cooperated with a Chinese semiconductor company MediaTek to create a system on a chip called GB10.
CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is usually a showcase for flashy and futuristic consumer gadgets. At this year's show, which started on Tuesday and ends on Friday, several companies announced the integration of artificial intelligence into home appliances, laptops and even grills. Other major announcements included a laptop from Lenovo with a rollable screen that can be expanded vertically. New robots have also appeared, including the competitive Roomba with a robotic arm.
Unlike Nvidia's traditional gaming GPUs, Project Digits is not aimed at consumers. instead, it is aimed at machine learning researchers, smaller companies and universities that want to develop advanced artificial intelligence but don't have billions of dollars to build massive data centers or purchase enough cloud credits.
“There is a huge gap for data scientists and machine learning researchers who are actively working and actively building something,” Huang said. “Maybe you don't need a giant cluster. You simply develop early versions of the model and iterate constantly. You can do it in the cloud, but it just costs a lot more.”
Nvidia says the supercomputer will cost around $3,000 when it becomes available in May and will be available from the company itself as well as some of its manufacturing partners. Huang said Project Digits is a placeholder name, meaning it may change by the time the computer goes on sale.
“If you have a good name for it, please contact us,” Huang said.
Diversification of activities
That's a very different kind of product than the GPUs that powered Nvidia's historic boom over the past two years. OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and other AI modelers such as Anthropic have teamed up with large cloud providers to source Nvidia GPUs for data centers due to their ability to run the most intensive models and computational loads.
Data center sales accounted for 88% of Nvidia's $35 billion in 2013 revenue last quarter.
Wall Street is focused on Nvidia's ability to diversify its business so that it is less dependent on a handful of customers buying massive AI systems.
Nvidia Project Digits supercomputer at the CES 2025 event in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Wednesday, January 8, 2025.
Bridget Bennet | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“It was a little scary to see Nvidia release something so good at such a low price,” Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Melius Research, wrote in a note this week. He said Nvidia may have “stealed the show” because of Project Digits and other announcements including gaming graphics cards, new robotic chips and a deal with Toyotas.
Project Digits, which runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used in the company's GPU server clusters, represents a huge increase in opportunities for researchers and universities, said David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Bader, who has worked on research projects for Nvidia in the past, said the computer appears to be able to handle enough data and information to train the largest and most modern models. He told CNBC Anthropic, Google, Amazon and others would “pay $100 million to build a supercomputer for training purposes” to get a system with this kind of capability.
Bader said that for $3,000, users will soon be able to get a product that can plug into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office. This is especially exciting for scientists, who often move to the private sector to gain access to larger and more powerful computers, he said.
“Any student who can have one of these systems, which costs about the same as a high-end laptop or gaming laptop, will be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said.
Reitzes said the computer could be Nvidia's first step into the $50 billion desktop and laptop chip market.
“It's not hard to imagine that it would be easy to do it all yourself and one day let the system run Windows,” Reitzes wrote. “But I think they don't want to step on too many toes.”
Huang, asked about this by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday, did not rule out this possibility.
He said MediaTek may be able to sell the GB10 chip to other computer makers in the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.
“Of course we have plans,” Huang said.
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