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Nvidia already sells a large number of computer chips to all manufacturers artificial intelligence examples. But now, at a time when people’s attention open source and do-it-yourself AI is on the rise, the company announced that it will also start offering a “high-end AI computer” later this year, starting at $3,000, that anyone can use in their home or office.
Nvidia’s new desktop computer, called Digits, will go on sale in May and is about the size of a notebook. It has Nvidia’s “superchip” called the GB10 Grace Blackwell, designed to accelerate the calculations needed to train and run AI models, and it has 128 gigabytes of integrated memory and up to 4 terabytes of NVMe storage to handle large AI applications.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, announced the new system, along with several other AI offerings, during a keynote speech today at CESthe annual computer industry conference held in Las Vegas. (You can see all the big announcements on the website WIRED CES live blog.)
“Putting AI supercomputers on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher, and student empowers them to participate in the age of AI,” Huang said in a statement released ahead of his keynote.
Nvidia says the Digits machine, which stands for “deep learning GPU technology,” will be able to run a single large programming language with 200 billion units, a rough measure of complexity and size. To do this today, you’d need to rent space from a cloud provider like AWS or Microsoft, or customize it with tiny AI chips. If two Digits machines are connected using a high-speed connection link, Nvidia says they will be able to run it very capable an existing version of Meta’s open source Llama model, which has 405 billion units.
Digits will make it easier for hobbyists and researchers to test models that come close to the original potential OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google Gemini in their offices or basements. But the best of the proprietary models, which reside within the giant data centers of Microsoft and Google, are arguably bigger and more powerful than anything Digits can do.
Nvidia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of this program AI boom. Its price has skyrocketed in the past few years as tech companies clamor for more chips. These are small AI robots. The company has proven to be adept at developing hardware and software to power AI, and its roadmap has become an important indicator of where the industry is expected to go.
When released, Digits will be Nvidia’s most powerful computing tool. It already sells several AI development chipsets called Jetson that start at around $250. This can run small AI models and be used as a mini computer or put on a robot to test different AI programs.
