Nvidia has capacity to supply robust AI growth despite constraints: CEO Jensen Huang

[TAIPEI] Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Tuesday (Jun 2) the company has enough supply to accommodate robust growth in central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) as it rides an AI boom.

The company, considered a barometer for the AI market’s health as its semiconductors are used in virtually every major data center in the world, acknowledged, however, that supply constraints remain a concern.

“We’ve secured supply for very robust growth of all of those systems,” Huang said at an Nvidia press conference during the Computex week in Taipei. “We have supply for very, very robust growth, but we’re still supply constrained.”

Huang was speaking a day after the US$5 trillion chip company unveiled a new chip that brings AI capabilities directly to personal computers. Nvidia’s new chip, which will be launched in the fall, would pit it against the likes of Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Apple. Huang said the RTX Spark PC chip is part of Nvidia’s efforts with Microsoft to “reinvent the PC” for the AI era.

Born in Taiwan’s southern city of Tainan, the Nvidia chief on May 27 announced plans to invest around US$150 billion a year in Taiwan, describing it as the epicentre of the AI revolution.

At the press conference on Tuesday, Huang said Taiwan is a strategic partner for the US because the island is investing in US manufacturing. The company plans to continue to invest in Taiwan and make the supply chain as resilient as possible.

“We are the largest purchaser of any company now for the ecosystem of Taiwan,” he said.

Demand for Nvidia AI chips, or GPUs, has generated tens of billions of dollars of revenue and helped make the company the most valuable in the world.

Huang said the company’s Vera data centre CPUs would be even more popular than its GPUs because of the CPUs’ crucial role in crunching information. Vera competes with data centre chips made by AMD and Intel.

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“This (Vera CPU) is going to be our new major growth driver,” Huang said during a presentation on Monday outlining Nvidia’s latest AI products. REUTERS