As Nvidia pushes to democratize AI, here’s everything it announced at GTC 2023

At this year’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia continued its AI hardware push with a specific focus on making its technology more accessible to enterprises across industries and streamlining the development of generative AI applications like ChatGPT.

The following is a daily recap of major announcements that the Santa Clara, California-based company made with links to in-depth coverage.

Rent AI supercomputing infrastructure with DGX Cloud

While Nvidia has been building hardware for AI for quite some time, the technology has taken some time to see mass adoption — partly owing to high costs. Back in 2020, its DGX A100 server box was sold for $199,000. To change this, the company today announced DGX Cloud, a service that will allow enterprises to access its AI supercomputing infrastructure and software through a web browser.

>>Follow VentureBeat’s ongoing Nvidia GTC spring 2023 coverage<<

DGX Cloud rents DGX Server boxes, each with eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of memory, and costs $36,999 a month for a single node.

Leveraging the power of DGX Cloud, the company also announced the launch of AI Foundations to help enterprises create and use custom generative AI models. The offering, Nvidia said, provides three cloud services: Nvidia NeMo for large language models (LLMs), Nvidia Picasso for image, video and 3D applications, and BioNeMO to generate scientific texts based on biological data.

New hardware for AI inference and recommendations

Alongside DGX and AI Foundations, Nvidia also debuted four inference platforms designed to help developers quickly build specialized generative AI applications. This includes Nvidia L4 for producing AI video; Nvidia L40 for 2D/3D image generation; Nvidia H100 NVL for deploying large language models; and Nvidia Grace Hopper — which connects the Grace CPU and Hopper GPU over a high-speed 900GB/sec coherent chip-to-chip interface — for recommendation systems built on giant datasets. 

The company says L4 can deliver 120x more AI-powered video performance than CPUs, combined with 99% better energy efficiency; while L40 serves as the engine of Omniverse, delivering 7x the inference performance for Stable Diffusion and 12x Omniverse performance over the previous generation.

Chipmakers get cuLitho at Nvidia GTC

At the event, Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang took the stage to announce Nvidia cuLitho software library for computational lithography. The offering, as Huang explained, will enable semiconductor enterprises to design and develop chips with ultrasmall transistors and wires while accelerating time to market and boosting the energy efficiency of the massive data centers that run 24/7 to drive the semiconductor manufacturing process.

“The chip industry is the foundation of nearly every other industry in the world,” said Huang. “With lithography at the limits of physics, NVIDIA’s introduction of cuLitho and collaboration with our partners TSMC, ASML and Synopsys allows fabs to increase throughput, reduce their carbon footprint and set the foundation for 2nm and beyond.”

The company also announced partnerships with Medtronic and Microsoft. The former, it said, will lead to the development of a common AI platform for software-defined medical devices capable of improving patient care. Meanwhile, the latter will see Microsoft Azure host Nvidia Omniverse and Nvidia DGX Cloud.

Isaac Sim for remote robot design and more

Along with utilizing Azure as a host, on the Omniverse front, Nvidia debuted its Isaac Sim platform designed to enable global teams to remotely collaborate to build, train, simulate, validate and deploy robots. The offering, it said, will help teams finish their designs more quickly. The company also launched Omniverse workflow to help car makers digitize their operations and announced BMW Group has started the rollout of its Omniverse platform to design a digital version of its future factory.

The 2023 Nvidia GTC event runs through March 23.