Nvidia details new AI chips, driverless car plan with Mercedes

Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaking giant Nvidia, put his company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom by making semiconductors more powerful than any of his rivals’

- TRIPP MICKLE

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, shows off the new chip series at the CES conference in Las Vegas on Monday. NYT

This year, he’s promising to do it again.On Monday, Mr Huang said the company would begin shipping a new AI chip later this year that can do more computing with less power than previous generations of chips could. Known as the Vera Rubin, the chip has been in development for three years and is designed to fulfil AI requests more quickly and cheaply than its predecessors.

Mr Huang, who spoke during CES, an annual tech conference in Las Vegas, also discussed Nvidia's surprisingly ambitious work around autonomous vehicles. This year, Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla’s Autopilot.

Nvidia's new Rubin chips are being manufactured and will be shipped to customers, including Microsoft and Amazon, in the second half of the year, fulfilling a promise Mr Huang made last March when he first described the chip at the company’s annual conference in San Jose, California.

Companies will be able to train AI models with one-quarter as many Rubin chips as its predecessor, the Blackwell. It can provide information for chatbots and other AI products for one-tenth of the cost. They will also be able to install the chips in data centres more quickly, courtesy of redesigned supercomputers that feature fewer cables.