Nvidia already sells boatloads of computer chips to every major company building proprietary artificial intelligence models. But now, at a moment when public interest in open source and do-it-yourself AI is soaring, the company announced it will also begin offering a “personal AI supercomputer,” that starts at $3,000 later this year that anyone can use in their own home or office.
Nvidia’s new desktop machine, dubbed Digits, will go on sale in May and is about the size of a small book. It contains an Nvidia “superchip” called GB10 Grace Blackwell optimized to accelerate the computations needed to train and run AI models, and comes equipped with 128GB of unified memory and up to 4TB of NVMe storage for handling especially large AI programs.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, announced the new system, along with several other AI offerings, during a keynote speech today at CES, an annual confab for the computer industry held in Las Vegas (you can check out all of the biggest announcements on the WIRED CES live blog).
“Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student empowers them to engage and shape 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 intelligence training system,” will be able to run a single large language model with up to 200 billion parameters, a rough measure of a model’s complexity and size. To do this today, you would need to rent space from a cloud provider like AWS or Microsoft, or build a custom system with a handful of chips designed for running AI. If two Digits machines are connected using a proprietary high-speed interconnect link, Nvidia says they will be able to run the most capable version available of Meta’s open source Llama model, which has 405 billion parameters.
Digits will make it easier for hobbyists and researchers to experiment with models that come close to the basic capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s Gemini in their offices or basements. But the best versions of those proprietary models, housed inside giant data centers owned by Microsoft and Google, are most likely larger as well as more powerful than anything Digits could handle.
Nvidia has been one of the largest beneficiaries of the AI boom. Its stock price skyrocketed over the past few years as tech companies clamored to buy vast quantities of the advanced hardware chips it produces, a crucial ingredient for developing cutting-edge AI. The company has proven adept at making hardware and software optimized for AI, and its product roadmap has become an important signal of where the industry is expected to head next.
When it’s released, Digits will be the most powerful consumer computing hardware Nvidia offers. It already sells a range of chipsets for AI development known as Jetson that start at roughly $250. These can run smaller AI models and either be used like a mini desktop computer or installed on a robot to test different AI programs.
