NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang is trying to set the record straight: Nvidia is not just a chipmaker - it's an accelerated computing company.
What To Know: In an interview Tuesday at Nvidia's GTC2024 event aired on CNBC's "Squawk On The Street," Huang explained why Nvidia is more than just a chip company.
There are lots of things that CPUs are not very good at and those things represent about 95% of the time that is spent on computing, Huang said, adding that Nvidia has found a way to offload those workloads and run the work "insanely fast." This process is referred to as accelerated computing and it's what Nvidia focuses on.
CNBC's Jim Cramer, who interviewed Huang, chimed in and suggested the Nvidia CEO was talking about a "total do-over of all technology" and Huang agreed. He told CNBC that there is $100 trillion of industry that can be transformed with AI.
"General purpose computing - general purpose almost anything, like a general purpose instrument of any kind - it's not very efficient," Huang said.
By using products that are designed for specific applications, you become much more efficient, which requires less energy and helps to lower costs, he said.
Nvidia announced its next-generation chip architecture this week called Blackwell. Blackwell GPUs contain 208 billion transistors and will cost somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000, the Nvidia CEO said, adding that Blackwell computers will replace thousands of general purpose computers.
"This is the largest chip the world's ever seen. This is beyond the limits of physics. We had to invent some new technology to make it possible to do this," Huang said.
Nvidia's Blackwell platform will help dramatically reduce energy usage. The chips make it possible for the computer to write its own software, which is referred to as artificial intelligence, he explained.
When you ask a computer with this technology a question, it understands the words and the meaning behind the words based on the context of the conversation, he said.
"There's a lot of waste in the world ... There's a lot of waste in just about every single industry. The challenge is that we've never been able to use a computer to understand the information of that industry .. We've been able to sequence genes, but we've never been able to understand what it means," Huang said.
Cramer asked Huang why Nvidia is currently valued at more than $2 trillion. The Nvidia CEO said the company serves the accelerated computing and AI niche, which is the foundation for computing going forward, and he reiterated that there is $100 trillion of industry that can be transformed with AI.
"The single-most important instrument of humanity is computing and now we have computers that could understand information of all different kinds. The impact to the industries are enormous," Huang said,
NVDA Price Action: Nvidia shares are up approximately 75% year-to-date. The stock was down 2.27% at $863.50 at the time of publication, according to Benzinga Pro.