On March 18, CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote presentation at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2024) provided an impressive demonstration of the competition Huawei and other Chinese high-tech companies face alongside the punitive challenge of US-led sanctions.
In a two-hour excursion to the frontiers of artificial intelligence, Huang introduced the company’s new Blackwell AI processor, which he said “will be the most successful product launch in our history.”
Named for US mathematician David Blackwell, the Blackwell B200 graphics processing unit (GPU) has 208 billion transistors compared with 80 billion for its Hopper H100 predecessor and is five times faster. The H100 has several times more computing power than the H20 that the US Commerce Department still allows Nvidia to sell in China.