Hi there, and welcome to this week’s edition of the Yahoo Finance Tech newsletter. I’m Dan Howley, and this week we’re talking about Nvidia’s GTC conference.
The first conference the company has held in person in five years, the keynote had the atmosphere of a religious revival and CEO Jensen Huang was the preacher.
Thousands of attendees crammed into SAP Center in San Jose, listening for two hours as Huang debuted the company's latest GPU technology that will power AI applications across the world.
🍪 The next-generation Blackwell AI chip: This was the big announcement at GTC. Huang took the wraps off of Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture that will power the company’s latest and greatest chips later this year. The GPU is actually two dies put together into a single chip. Nvidia says customers will also be able to purchase the company’s GB200 Superchip, which combines Nvidia’s Grace CPU with two Blackwell GPUs. It's supposed to be 30 times faster while using 25 times less energy — lowering the cost of AI.
According to Nvidia, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are already preparing for the arrival of Blackwell and GB200 chips.
Wall Street, though, is expecting a lot out of Nvidia in the year ahead, with some analysts raising their price targets on the company’s shares to $1,000 ahead of the show. Now Nvidia just has to deliver. No big deal.
🥽 Nvidia 🤝 Apple: Amid Nvidia’s flurry of Blackwell-based news, the company also announced that it’s bringing its Omniverse technology to Apple’s Vision Pro AR/VR headset. A team-up with Apple, the world’s second-most-valuable company by market capitalization, would normally get more fanfare. But Nvidia, the world’s third-most-valuable company, treated the news like any other part of the show.
Still, getting Omniverse on the Vision Pro is big for both Nvidia and Apple. Nvidia benefits by showing off its high-powered graphics streaming capabilities and AR/VR capabilities, while Apple gets the opportunity to showcase the Vision Pro’s enterprise use case. Now both companies need customers to buy in too.
🤖 Nvidia's human-like robot tech: In addition to its GPU work, Nvidia also debuted its GR00T foundation model for humanoid robots. The software will bring generative AI capabilities to human-like robots including natural voice understanding and fine motor controls so they can mimic how people talk and grab and move objects.
It all sounds very sci-fi, and still is for the most part. We’re still a long way from swilling beers with robots like Bender from “Futurama,” but Nvidia clearly hopes this is the start of an even greater push by the broader tech community to get human-like robots up and running.
That, however, also raises the question of whether those robots will replace humans in certain areas of the workforce. It’s hard to imagine they won’t steal at least some jobs if they become mass-produced and cheap. After all, we’ve already got small robots that carry food to your tablet in some restaurants, a job that I had in high school.
Hopefully by then, though, the robots will be less Terminator and more Johnny 5. | 
