LAS VEGAS: Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaking giant Nvidia, put his company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom by making semiconductors more powerful than any of his rivals’. This year, he’s promising to do it again.

On Monday, Huang said the company would begin shipping a new AI chip later this year that can do more computing with less power than previous generations of chips could.

Known as the Vera Rubin, the chip has been in development for three years and is designed to fulfill AI requests more quickly and cheaply than its predecessors.

Huang, who spoke during CES, an annual tech conference in Las Vegas, also discussed Nvidia’s surprisingly ambitious work around autonomous vehicles. This year, Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla’s Autopilot.

Nvidia’s new Rubin chips are being manufactured and will be shipped to customers, including Microsoft and Amazon, in the second half of the year, fulfilling a promise Huang made last March when he first described the chip at the company’s annual conference in San Jose, California.

Companies will be able to train AI models with one-quarter as many Rubin chips as its predecessor, the Blackwell. It can provide information for chatbots and other AI products for one-tenth of the cost. They will also be able to install the chips in data centers more quickly, courtesy of redesigned supercomputers that feature fewer cables.

If the new chips live up to their promise, they could allow companies to develop AI at a lower cost and at least begin to respond to the soaring electrical demands of data centers being built around the world.

“This is how we’re going to get everybody to the next frontier and push AI to the next level and of course, to build these data centers energy efficiently and cost efficiently, as well,” Huang said.

The Rubin chips are named for astronomer Vera Rubin, who did groundbreaking research on dark matter. The new chips are key to maintaining Nvidia’s dominance of the AI industry and its perch as the world’s most valuable company. Nvidia’s AI chips, which account for more than 90% of the market, are highly coveted by businesses and governments around the world. It sells them for about $30,000 each, with nearly three-quarters of that being pure profit.

But the company is facing increased competition from chipmakers and even some customers who are eager to seize a slice of the lucrative AI industry. Last year, Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, and Google, which buys Nvidia chips but also makes its own chips, struck deals to provide their technology to OpenAI, one of the world’s largest users of AI chips.

The rising threat contributed to Nvidia’s deal last month to license technology from the chip startup Groq. The agreement is expected to help Nvidia develop chips that allow AI to more efficiently fulfill requests through a process known as inference.

Because more people are using AI, chipmakers are trying to make delivering it less expensive and less power hungry, said Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, a tech research firm. “That’s the name of the game because utilization is very early,” he said.

The competitive challenges have buffeted Nvidia alongside a series of geopolitical headaches. Huang spent much of last year lobbying President Donald Trump to allow Nvidia to sell its AI chips to China. At the same time, he was trying to fend off efforts by Beijing to discourage Chinese companies from buying Nvidia’s chips because of security concerns.

In December, Trump granted the company permission to sell its second-most-powerful chip to China. But Beijing has not decided whether it will allow its companies to buy Nvidia products. Demand for Nvidia’s chips has turned Huang, 62, into a globe-trotting salesperson and diplomat.

He traveled with Trump to the Middle East and Britain, where he played a key role in technology deals between nations.

Nvidia’s business has flourished during the AI boom of the past three years. In November, the company reported a quarterly profit of $31.9 billion, a 65% increase from a year earlier and 245% from the year before that.

It expects about $500 billion in sales through the end of this year. Still, Huang has been eager to diversify Nvidia’s business and expand its roster of customers. He has been pushing the company to become a major player in robotics and autonomous vehicles.

On Monday, he said Nvidia had developed new AI software that would allow customers such as Uber and Lucid to develop cars that navigate roads autonomously. It will share the system, called Alpamayo, to spread its influence and the appeal of Nvidia’s chip technology.

Since 2020, Nvidia has been working with Mercedes to develop a class of self-driving cars. They will begin shipping an early example of their collaboration when Mercedes CLA cars become available in the first half of the year in Europe and the United States.

Huang said the company started working on self-driving technology eight years ago. It has more than 1,000 people working on the project. “Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous,” Huang said.

The New York Times