Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered the keynote address at the american company’s GTC 2024 conference in a rock concert atmosphere. As a preamble to the speech, which was followed by over 10,000 fans, excuse me, spectators, a giant screen projection, generated in real time by artificial intelligence, was described by our colleague Sally Ward-Foxton from EETimes as “a Rorschach test in vibrant technicolor“, which is perhaps the best description of today’s AI – of a certain kind of AI anyway.
Jensen Huang could then take to the stage and brandish Blackwell, the new Nvidia GPU that will be the backbone of artificial intelligence for years to come. This will extend Nvidia’s near-monopoly in the field, a monopoly that enables it to post increasingly decadent net profits every quarter (at 55% of sales at the last count). According to the star of the day, a single rack equipped with these processors requires liquid cooling that ejects two litres of hot water per second, “enough to power a Jacuzzi“. Laughter in the arena that usually hosts the Sharks, the ice hockey team from San José, a city of a million souls (more than San Francisco) stuck in Silicon Valley where summers are very hot and water shortages a growing concern.