Just weeks after Nvidia announced the availability of its $249 “compact AI supercomputer,” the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit for startups and hobbyists, CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company is planning to launch a personal AI supercomputer called Project Digits with a starting price of $3,000. The desktop-sized system features the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which enables it to handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters. Nvidia claims there is enough processing power to run high-end AI models (performing up to one quadrillion AI calculations per second) while the compact system can run from a standard power outlet. Continue reading CES: Nvidia Will Launch a $3,000 Personal AI Supercomputer

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang kicked off CES 2025 with a keynote that was filled with new product announcements and visionary demonstrations of how the company plans to advance the field of AI. The first product that Huang unveiled was the GeForce RTX 50 series of consumer graphics processing units (GPUs). The series is also called RTX Blackwell because it is based on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell microarchitecture design for next generation data center and gaming applications. To showcase RTX Blackwell’s prowess, Huang played an impressively photorealistic video sequence of rich imagery under contrasting light ranges — all rendered in real time. Continue reading CES: Nvidia Unveils New GeForce RTX 50, AI Video Rendering

Amazon Web Services is building a supercomputer in collaboration with Anthropic, the AI startup in which the e-commerce giant has an $8 billion minority stake. Hundreds of thousands of AWS’s flagship Trainium chips will be amassed in an “Ultracluster” that when it is completed in 2025 will be one of the largest supercomputers in the world for model training, Amazon says. The company announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual servers as well as Trn2 UltraServers designed to train and deploy AI models and teased next-generation Trainium3 chips. Continue reading AWS Building Trainium-Powered Supercomputer with Anthropic

President Biden issued the first-ever National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence, outlining how the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and various national security groups should use artificial intelligence technology to advance national interests and deter threats, touching on everything from nuclear weapons to the supply chain. “The NSM is designed to galvanize federal government adoption of AI to advance the national security mission, including by ensuring that such adoption reflects democratic values and protects human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and privacy,” the White House announced in a statement. Continue reading The White House Defines Government Objectives Involving AI

Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $6 billion in Series B funding. While the company says the funds will be “used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development,” some outlets are reporting a significant portion is earmarked to build an AI supercomputer to power the next generation of its foundation model Grok. The company publicly released the open-source Grok-1 as a chatbot on X social in November, and recently debuted Grok-1.5 and 1.5V iterations with long-context capability and image understanding. Continue reading Musk Said to Envision Supercomputer as xAI Raises $6 Billion

Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japan’s SoftBank, wants to transform the tech conglomerate’s Arm subsidiary into an AI powerhouse, and he is investing $64 billion (10 trillion yen) to implement the plan, which includes turning the UK-based unit into an AI chip supplier. Son announced that by spring 2025 Arm is expected to have its first prototype, followed by mass production by contract suppliers and commercial sales in the fall. Arm designs but does not manufacture circuitry, supplying what it calls “chip architecture” to customers including Nvidia and Qualcomm. Continue reading SoftBank’s Arm Plans to Supply AI Chips, Open Data Centers

Microsoft and Quantinuum have improved the logical error rate in quantum computing by 800x, a breakthrough the partners say has the potential to usher in a new era of qubit processing. Using ion-trap hardware from Quantinuum and a qubit-virtualization system from Microsoft, the team ran more than 14,000 experiments with no errors — a huge feat in the notoriously fickle realm of qubits. The system has error diagnostics and corrections built in, identifying which errors need to be fixed and correcting them without destroying the underlying logical qubits, according to the companies. Continue reading Microsoft, Quantinuum Tout Advance in Quantum Computing

Microsoft and OpenAI are contemplating an AI supercomputer data center that may cost as much as $100 billion. Called Stargate, the aim would be to have it operational by 2008 to drive OpenAI’s next generation of artificial intelligence. According to reports, the Stargate complex would span hundreds of U.S. acres and use up to 5 gigawatts of power, which is massive (the equivalent of a substantial metropolitan power grid). In light of those power needs, a nuclear power source is said to be under consideration. The project is not yet green-lit, and no U.S. location has been selected. Continue reading Microsoft, OpenAI Considering a Supercomputer Data Center

Nvidia unveiled what it is calling the world’s most powerful AI processing system, the Blackwell GPU, purpose built to power real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at what the company says will be up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessors. Blackwell’s capabilities will usher in what the company promises will be a new era in generative AI computing. News from Nvidia’s GTC 2024 developer conference included the NIM software platform, purpose built to streamline the setup of custom and pre-trained AI models in a production environment, and the DGX SuperPOD server, powered by Blackwell. Continue reading GTC: Nvidia Unveils Blackwell GPU for Trillion-Parameter LLMs

Facebook chief Tom Alison says parent company Meta Platforms is building a giant AI model that will eventually “power our entire video ecosystem.” Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference this week, Alison said the model will drive the company’s video recommendation engine across all platforms that host long-form video as well as the short-form Reels, which are limited to 90 seconds. Alison said the company began experimenting with the new, super-sized AI model last year and found that it helped improve Facebook’s Reels watch time by anywhere from 8-10 percent. Continue reading Meta Building Giant AI Model to Power Entire Video Ecosystem

IBM has produced two quantum computing systems to meet its 2023 roadmap, one based on a chip named Condor, which at 1,121 functioning qubits is the largest transmon-based quantum processor released to date. Transmon-based chips use a type of superconducting qubit that is more error-resistant than typical qubits, which are notoriously unstable. The second IBM system uses three Heron chips, each with 133 qubits. The more modestly scaled Heron and its successor, Flamingo, play a vital role in IBM’s quantum plan, which boasts major progress as a result of these developments. Continue reading IBM Announces Significant Advances in Quantum Computing

Aurora, built by Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is the latest supercomputer to come online at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago and is among a new breed of exascale supercomputers that draws on artificial intelligence. When fully operational in 2024, Aurora is expected to be the first such computer that will be able to achieve two quintillion operations per second. Brain analytics and the design of batteries that last longer and charge faster are among the vast potential uses of exascale machines. Continue reading Aurora Supercomputer Targets 2 Quintillion Ops per Second

The UK government plans to invest at least £225 million (about $273 million) in AI supercomputing with the aim of bringing Great Britain into closer parity with AI leaders the U.S. and China. Among the new machines coming online is Dawn, which was built by the University of Cambridge Research Computing Services, Intel and Dell and is being hosted by the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab. “Dawn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the UK, deployed and ready to use now,” said Dr. Paul Calleja, director of Research Computing at Cambridge. Continue reading United Kingdom Investing $273 Million in AI Supercomputing

Europe is moving forward in the supercomputer space, with two new exascale machines set to come online. Jupiter will be installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, with assembly set to start as early as Q1 2024. Scotland will be home to the UK’s first exascale supercomputer, to be hosted at the University of Edinburgh, with installation commencing in 2025. An exascale supercomputer can run calculations at speeds of one exaflop (1,000 petaflops) or greater. On completion, these two new supercomputers will land in the top percent of the world’s high-performers. Continue reading Germany, UK to Host Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputers

Cerebras Systems has unveiled the Condor Galaxy 1, powered by nine networked supercomputers designed for a total of 4 exaflops of AI compute via 54 million cores. Cerebras says the CG-1 greatly accelerates AI model training, completing its first run on a large language AI trained for Abu Dhabi-based G42 in only 10 days. Cerebras and G42 have partnered to offer the Santa Clara, California-based CG-1 as a cloud service, positioning it as an alternative to Nvidia’s DGX GH200 cloud supercomputer. The companies plan to release CG-2 and CG-3 in early 2024. Continue reading Cerebras, G42 Partner on a Supercomputer for Generative AI