In a packed Las Vegas arena, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang stood on stage and marveled over the crisp real-time computer graphics displayed on the screen behind him. He watched as a dark-haired woman walked through ornate gilded double doors and took in the rays of light that poured in through stained glass windows.
“The amount of geometry that you saw was absolutely insane,” Mr. Huang told an audience of thousands at CES 2025 the night of Jan. 6. “It would have been impossible without artificial intelligence.”
The chipmaker and AI darling unveiled its GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop and laptop GPUs – its most advanced consumer graphics processor units for gamers, creators, and developers. The tech is designed for use on both desktop and laptop computers. Reuters reported that Nvidia also took the wraps off new products such as artificial intelligence to better train robots and cars, and its first desktop computer.
Ahead of Mr. Huang’s speech, Nvidia stock climbed 3.4% to top its record set in November. Nvidia and other AI stocks keep climbing even as criticism rises that their stock prices have already shot too high, too fast. Despite worries about a potential bubble, the industry continues to talk up its potential.
Mr. Huang said the GPUs, which use the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence chip, Blackwell, can deliver breakthroughs in AI-driven rendering. Reuters reported the chips will range in price from $549 to $1,999, with top models arriving on Jan. 30 and lower-tier models coming in February.
“Blackwell, the engine of AI, has arrived for PC gamers, developers, and creatives,” Mr. Huang said, adding that Blackwell “is the most significant computer graphics innovation since we introduced programmable shading 25 years ago.” Blackwell technology is now in full production, he said.
Building on the tech Nvidia released 25 years ago, the company announced that it would also introduce “RTX Neural Shaders,” which use AI to help render game characters in deep detail – a task that’s notoriously tricky because people can easily spot a small error on digital humans.
Mr. Huang said Nvidia is also introducing a new suite of technologies that enable “autonomous characters” to perceive, plan, and act like human players. Those characters can help players plan strategies or adapt tactics to challenge players and create more dynamic battles.
During his speech, Reuters reported Mr. Huang also unveiled what Nvidia calls Cosmos foundation models, which generate photo-realistic video used to train robots and self-driving cars at a much lower cost than using conventional data.
By creating so-called “synthetic” training data, the models help robots and cars understand the physical world similar to the way that large language models have helped chatbots generate responses in natural language, according to Reuters.
Users will be able to give Cosmos a text description that can be used to generate video of a world that obeys the laws of physics, Reuters reported. This promises to be much cheaper than gathering data as it is done today such as putting cars on the road to gather video or having humans teach robots repetitive tasks.
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya said it remained to be seen whether the robotics push would significantly boost Nvidia’s sales, Reuters reported.
“The challenge in our view is … making the products reliable enough, cheap enough, and pervasive enough to spawn credible business models,” Mr. Arya said in a note to clients. “From that perspective, robotics could remain another cool but niche opportunity such as metaverse or autonomous cars.”
In addition to Nvidia, tech giants such as AMD, Google, and Samsung are at CES 2025 to unveil artificial intelligence tools aimed at helping both content creators and consumers in their quest for entertainment.
Reuters reported that Nvidia’s stock closed at a record high of $149.43 on Jan. 5, bringing its valuation to $3.66 trillion and making it the world’s second-most valuable listed company behind Apple.
This story was reported by The Associated Press. Material from Reuters was used in this report.
