Nvidia Unveils Next-Gen RTX 50 Series GPUs and Confirms Blackwell AI Chips in Full Production

Nvidia CEO Huang unveils next generation RTX GPUs; Blackwell in full production By Investing.com

Investing.com-- NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company's latest line of RTX graphical processing units, while also stating that the company's Blackwell artificial chips were now in full production. Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Huang said the new GPUs- the RTX 50 series, will boast at least twice the performance of their predecessors, the 40 series, and will use AI to improve their graphical processing abilities. The flagship GPU in the new line will be the RTX 5090. Huang said Nvidia's next generation Blackwell AI chips were in full production. The Blackwell line is expected to underscore Nvidia's next wave of earnings growth, as major technology firms ramp up capital spending on data center infrastructure to power their AI development. The Nvidia CEO took the stage donned in his trademark black leather jacket, and claimed that the Blackwell line would be far more power efficient that its predecessors, while offering substantially more performance. Nvidia shares hit a record high on Monday in anticipation of Huang's address. The company is at the heart of a massive valuation boom that added about $2 trillion to its market capitalization in the past year, as investors cheered its exposure to the AI boom. Nvidia makes the most advanced AI chips in the market, with its Blackwell lineup already seeing strong demand and potential supply shortfalls in 2025. Nvidia clocked back-to-back quarters of stellar earnings growth on the AI boom. But its guidance for the current quarter disappointed some lofty expectations, raising doubts over just how much more earnings growth AI will elicit.

Nvidia releases gaming chips for PCs, tapping AI features from data center GPUs

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder, president and CEO, speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2024. Nvidia revealed new chips for desktop and laptop PCs on Monday that use the same Blackwell architecture underpinning the company's fastest AI processors for servers and data centers. The chips, called GeForce RTX 50-series, will come pre-installed in computers ranging from about $550 to $2,000, the company said. Laptops with the chips will start shipping in March. Nvidia unveiled the processors at CES in Las Vegas, where CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote address on Monday. "Can you imagine, you have this incredible graphics card, Blackwell, I'm going to shrink it and put it in there," Huang said, holding up a laptop. Nvidia, which has soared past $3.5 trillion in market cap by selling AI chips to giant cloud vendors and other tech companies, was until the last few years known for selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to power video games. Nvidia's first chip in late 1999 was designed to draw triangles and polygons quickly for 3D games. "Of course, back then, we were a gaming company, and these GPUs were created to accelerate games," Justin Walker, senior director of product at Nvidia, said on a press call. Wall Street is less enthused about Nvidia's gaming business these days given the explosion in AI and ever-increasing demand for more processing power. In the quarter that ended in October, Nvidia's gaming sales accounted for under 10% of total revenue, compared to 88% from data center chips. Nvidia has the vast majority of the AI GPU market for data centers, outpacing rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. But CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is all about consumer products, and the new chips announced Monday are primarily intended for gaming.