Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talks about Project Digits, a personal AI supercomputer for researchers and students, during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 6, 2025. AI-infused gadgets, robots and vehicles will once again compete for spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show, as retailers look behind the scenes for ways to deal with tariffs threatened by US President-elect Donald Trump. The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) officially opens in Las Vegas on January 7, 2025, but the days leading up to it are packed with product announcements. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was welcomed like a rock star this week at CES in Las Vegas, after artificial intelligence boom this made the chip maker the second most valuable company in the world.
In his nearly two-hour keynote on Monday at the start of the annual conference, Huang packed the 12,000-seat auditorium, drawing comparisons to the way Steve Jobs would unveil products at Apple events.
Huang concluded with an Apple-like trick: a surprise product reveal. He brought out one of Nvidia’s server racks and, using a bit of stage magic, erected a much smaller version, which looked like a tiny computer cube.
“This is an AI supercomputer,” Huang said as he donned an alligator leather jacket. “It runs Nvidia’s entire AI stack. All Nvidia software runs on this one.”
Huang said the computer is called Project Digits and runs the related Grace Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) that currently run the most advanced AI server clusters. The GPU is paired with HANDGrace Central Processing Unit (CPU). Nvidia worked with a Chinese semiconductor company MediaTek to create a system-on-a-chip called GB10.
Formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is usually the place to launch flashy and futuristic consumer gadgets. At this year’s trade show, which began Tuesday and ends Friday, several companies announced integrations of artificial intelligence with appliances, laptops and even grills. Other big announcements included a laptop from Lenovo that has a rollable display that can expand vertically. There were also new robots, including a competitor Roomba with a robotic arm.
Unlike Nvidia’s traditional gaming GPUs, Project Digits isn’t aimed at consumers. instead, it’s aimed at machine learning researchers, smaller companies and universities that want to develop advanced artificial intelligence but don’t have billions of dollars to build massive data centers or buy enough cloud credits.
“There’s a gaping hole for data scientists and ML researchers who are actively working, who are actively building something,” Huang said. “Maybe you don’t need a giant cluster. You’re just developing early versions of the model and iterating all the time. You could do it in the cloud, but it just costs a lot more money.”
The supercomputer will cost around $3,000 when it becomes available in May, Nvidia said, and will be available from the company itself as well as some of its manufacturing partners. Huang said Project Digits is a placeholder name, indicating it could change by the time the computer goes on sale.
“If you have a good name for it, please contact us,” Huang said.
Business diversification
It’s a dramatically different kind of product than the GPUs that fueled Nvidia’s historic boom over the past two years. OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and other AI modelers like Anthropic have joined major cloud providers in snapping up Nvidia’s data center GPUs for their ability to run the most intensive models and compute workloads.
Data center sales accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s $35 billion in revenue in the last quarter.
Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business so that it relies less on a handful of customers buying massive AI systems.
Nvidia’s Project Digits supercomputer during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, on Wednesday, January 8, 2025.
Bridget Bennett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“It was a bit scary to see Nvidia come out with something so good for such a low price,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note this week. He said Nvidia may have “stolen the show,” due to Project Digits as well as other announcements including gaming graphics cards, new robotics chips and a deal with Toyota.
Project Digits, which runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used on the company’s GPU server clusters, represents a huge increase in opportunity for researchers and universities, said David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Bader, who has worked on research projects with Nvidia in the past, said the computer appears to be able to process enough data and information to train the largest and most sophisticated models. He told CNBC Anthropic, Google, Amazon and others would “pay $100 million to build a supercomputer for training” to get a system with these capabilities.
For $3,000, users can soon have a product that they can plug into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office, Bader said. It’s especially exciting for academics, who have often gone to private industry to access bigger and more powerful computers, he said.
“Any student who can have one of these systems that cost about the same as a high-end laptop or gaming laptop will be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said.
Reitzes said the computer could be Nvidia’s first move into the $50 billion PC and laptop chip market.
“It’s not too hard to imagine that it would be easy to just do everything ourselves and have the system run Windows one day,” Reitzes wrote. “But I guess they don’t want to step on too many toes.”
Huang did not rule out the possibility when asked by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.
He said that MediaTek may be able to sell the GB10 chip to other PC makers in the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.
“Obviously we have plans,” Huang said.
