In the years it has taken Nvidia’s graphical processing units, first developed for video gaming, to find their way to the centre of the computing world, chief executive Jensen Huang has been nothing if not consistent. His long-running prediction that the need for new forms of “accelerated computing” would demand a new chip architecture has come to spectacular fruition with the advent of generative AI.
This week, as the tech world’s attention swung fully on to Nvidia for its annual technology conference, Huang had a new mantra: “Full-stack computing”. The world may know Nvidia as a chip company, but its CEO’s eyes have been set on the full computing “stack” required for AI — not just processors, but complete hardware systems and the software needed to optimise their performance and make them useful.
As the battle lines around AI chips harden, with rivals like AMD and customers like Microsoft and Amazon developing their own specialised processors, this week’s event was a reminder that the focus of competition has already moved well beyond the chips.