Nvidia unveils new super-fast AI chips

US tech firm Nvidia has unveiled its latest range of powerful artificial intelligence chips as it looks to cement its place as the market leader in the growing industry.

Announcing its new Blackwell chips, which will be released later this year, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said they were dramatically faster and more powerful than its predecessor.

Nvidia’s hardware is used by many of the biggest tech firms in the world – including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta – to power their AI models.

Mr Huang said the new Blackwell chips were twice as powerful when it came to training AI models as its current generation chips, and were five times faster when it came to inference – the speed at which AI chatbots can respond to queries.

Mr Huang said “the inference capability of Blackwell is off the charts”.

Nvidia has become the key player in AI chips in recent years, particularly as generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have taken off, seeing the firm’s market value skyrocket as a result – reaching two trillion dollars last month.

It is currently the third-most valuable company in the world, behind only Microsoft and Apple.

The company also unveiled new software tools to make it easier for businesses to incorporate AI tools into their work, as well as a new line of chips aimed at getting chatbots into cars, and another range to help with the creation of humanoid robots, as Nvidia looks to diversify its offerings further.