NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang today kicked off the COMPUTEX conference in Taipei, announcing platforms that companies can use to ride a historic wave of generative AI that’s transforming industries from advertising to manufacturing to telecom.
“We’re back,” Huang roared as he took the stage after years of virtual keynotes, some from his home kitchen. “I haven’t given a public speech in almost four years — wish me luck!”
Speaking for nearly two hours to a packed house of some 3,500, he described accelerated computing services, software and systems that are enabling new business models and making current ones more efficient.
“Accelerated computing and AI mark a reinvention of computing,” said Huang, whose travels in his hometown over the past week have been tracked daily by local media.
In a demonstration of its power, he used the massive 8K wall he spoke in front of to show a text prompt generating a theme song for his keynote, singable as any karaoke tune. Huang, who occasionally bantered with the crowd in his native Taiwanese, briefly led the audience in singing the new anthem.
“We’re now at the tipping point of a new computing era with accelerated computing and AI that’s been embraced by almost every computing and cloud company in the world,” he said, noting 40,000 large companies and 15,000 startups now use NVIDIA technologies with 25 million downloads of CUDA software last year alone.
A New Engine for Enterprise AI
For enterprises that need the ultimate in AI performance, he unveiled DGX GH200, a large-memory AI supercomputer. It uses NVIDIA NVLink to combine up to 256 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips into a single data-center-sized GPU.
The GH200 Superchip, which Jensen said is now in full production, combines an energy-efficient NVIDIA Grace CPU with a high-performance NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU in one superchip.
The DGX GH200 packs an exaflop of performance and 144 terabytes of shared memory, nearly 500x more than in a single NVIDIA DGX A100 320GB system. That lets developers build large language models for generative AI chatbots, complex algorithms for recommender systems, and graph neural networks used for fraud detection and data analytics.
Google Cloud, Meta and Microsoft are among the first expected to gain access to the DGX GH200, which can be used as a blueprint for future hyperscale generative AI infrastructure.
Turbocharging Cloud Networks
Separately, Huang unveiled NVIDIA Spectrum-X, a networking platform purpose-built to improve the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI clouds. It combines Spectrum-4 Ethernet switches with BlueField-3 DPUs and software to deliver 1.7x gains in AI performance and power efficiency over traditional Ethernet fabrics.
NVIDIA Spectrum-X, Spectrum-4 switches and BlueField-3 DPUs are available now from system makers including Dell Technologies, Lenovo and Supermicro.
Bringing Game Characters to Life
Generative AI impacts how people play, too.
Huang announced NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a foundry service developers can use to build and deploy custom AI models for speech, conversation and animation. It will give non-playable characters conversational skills so they can respond to questions with lifelike personalities that evolve.
NVIDIA ACE for Games includes AI foundation models such as NVIDIA Riva to detect and transcribe the player’s speech. The text prompts NVIDIA NeMo to generate customized responses animated with NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face.
Digitizing the World’s Largest Industries
Generative AI is also spawning new opportunities in the $700 billion digital advertising industry.
For example, WPP, the world’s largest marketing services organization, is working with NVIDIA to build a first-of-its kind generative AI-enabled content engine on Omniverse Cloud.
In a demo, Huang showed how creative teams will connect their 3D design tools such as Adobe Substance 3D, to build digital twins of client products in NVIDIA Omniverse. Then, content from generative AI tools trained on responsibly sourced data and built with NVIDIA Picasso will let them quickly produce virtual sets. WPP clients can then use the complete scene to generate a host of ads, videos and 3D experiences for global markets and users to experience on any web device.
“Today ads are retrieved, but in the future when you engage information much of it will be generated — the computing model has changed,” Huang said.
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