Nvidia stock was gaining on Monday after CEO Jensen Huang announced its next generation of artificial-intelligence chips. The company is aiming to maintain its lead in AI processors against rivals that are speeding up their chip development.
expects to launch the Blackwell Ultra chip in 2025, and the next-generation Rubin chip platform in 2026, featuring new graphics-processing units and a new central-processing unit called Vera, Huang said in a speech on Sunday ahead of the Computex trade show in Taiwan.
Nvidia had already made it clear that it plans to release a new generation of AI chips every year, but the company’s range of products is increasing. It is pushing into the CPU market traditionally dominated by
and
arguing a combination of its GPUs and CPUs will lead to significant cost and energy savings.
“Our basic philosophy is very simple: build the entire data center scale, disaggregate and sell to you parts on a one-year rhythm, and push everything to technology limits,” Huang said.
Nvidia stock was up 4% at $1,140.09 in early trading. The stock closed down 0.8% on Friday. The company will complete its planned 10-for-1 stock split on Friday this week.
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“[Nvidia] will now operate on a 12-month cadence which I suspect that its smaller competitors will struggle to keep pace with….Nvidia clearly intends to keep its dominance for as long as possible and in the current generation, there is nothing really on the horizon to challenge that,” wrote independent analyst Richard Windsor, who publishes Radio Free Mobile.
Nvidia’s pace of development is forcing its rivals to react. AMD CEO Lisa Su introduced the MI325X accelerator in her own speech at the conference. It is set to be available in the fourth quarter of 2024.
AMD said it would then release the MI350 series in 2025, which it expects to perform up to 35 times better in inference—the process of generating answers or results from AI models—compared with the current MI300 series. That will be followed by the MI400 series in 2026.
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“With our updated annual cadence of products, we are relentless in our pace of innovation, providing the leadership capabilities and performance the AI industry and our customers expect,” said Brad McCredie, corporate vice president of Data Center Accelerated Compute at AMD, in a statement.
AMD shares were up 1.8% in early trading. AMD was a recent Barron’s stock pick. We noted that it can benefit even if it continues to be a much smaller player than Nvidia in AI chips. The
iShares Semiconductor exchange-traded fund
was unchanged, while the
was little changed.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
