At a huge indoor concert venue in Silicon Valley on 18 March Nvidia (NVDA:NASDAQ) founder and chief executive Jensen Huang took the stage to a score composed entirely by AI (artificial intelligence) to introduce his company’s latest creation.

Assembled at the developer conference were researchers and experts from just about every field which uses Nvidia’s chips to process large data sets, from climatology to robotics, from medtech and EVs (electric vehicles) to gaming, alternative energy and everything in between.

They were all gathered for the much-anticipated unveiling of the firm’s new B200 ‘Blackwell’ processor, which can handle data requests 30 times faster than its predecessor at up to 25 times less cost and is intended to ‘power a new era of computing’ while maintaining Nvidia’s 80% share of the AI chip market.

Without getting into the technical specification, the Blackwell GPU architecture contains a mind-boggling 208 billion transistors and features six ‘transformative technologies’ for accelerated computing to help breakthroughs in data processing, engineering simulation, design automation, CAD (computer-aided design), quantum computing – reputedly ‘the next big thing’ – and of course AI.

There were glowing testimonies from the great and the good, including Sundar Pichai, of Alphabet (GOOG:NASDAQ), Andy Jassey of Amazon (AMZN:NASDAQ), Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms (META:NASDAQ), Satya Nadella of Microsoft (MSFT:NASDAQ) and Sam Altman of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT sparked the whole AI ‘mania’ to begin with.

Nvidia’s chips are deeply embedded in services such as Google Cloud, Google DeepMind, the full suite of AWS (Amazon Web Services) solutions, Microsoft Cloud, Meta’s Facebook and open-source Llama models and Oracle’s data centres.

The Blackwell processor, named after David Blackwell, the first black scholar inducted into the US National Academy of Science, is designed to work with Nvidia’s other ‘superchips’ such as Grace, using a proprietary protocol to crunch AI-related data at speeds never considered possible.

That said, it has a tough act to follow as the firm’s current ‘Hopper’ series is largely responsible for Nvidia’s explosive growth so far with its flagship H100 chip becoming ‘one of the most prized commodities in the tech world, fetching tens of thousands of dollars per chip’ according to Bloomberg.

Yet for all the excitement over Blackwell, Nvidia shares actually dropped in after-hours trading suggesting the news was already priced in after the stock’s remarkable 240% gain in the last 12 months.

There were no specific details on pricing or when deliveries would begin, and with rivals like AMD (AMD:NASDAQ) and Intel (INTC:NASDAQ) set to bring their own ‘AI superchips’ to market there is no guarantee Nvidia will maintain its current lead. 

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