CES 2025: Nvidia CEO unveils its first PC, AI-gaming chips

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday launched a range of new AI products including its RTX 50 series of Blackwell GPU, a new generation of gaming chips, and its first personal computer, at CES 2025, the annual tech conference held in Las Vegas.

“Today we’re announcing our next generation (of) the RTX Blackwell family. The GPU is just a beast (with) 92 billion transistors, 4000 AI TOPS (trillions of operations per second), three times higher than last generation, and 380 RF TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second),” Jensen Huang said in his keynote address.

The price of the new chips is expected to range from $549 to $1,999.

With its flagship 'Blackwell' AI technology, the chips promise movie-like graphics by enhancing visual details, particularly in areas like shaders, which can add realistic imperfections such as smudges or textures to surfaces.

Additionally, the chips integrate advanced AI features to help game developers create lifelike human faces, addressing a key area where even minor inaccuracies are easily noticed by players.

The top-tier versions of the new series will be launched on January 30, while lower-tier versions will follow in February.

Nvidia highlighted that its mid-range $549 model will match the performance of its previous flagship, the RTX 4090, which retailed at $1,600. The chips, designed for individual developers as well, come in a compact form factor for quicker AI testing. A desktop version featuring the new technology will be available in March. With these innovations, Nvidia aims to strengthen its gaming chip business while continuing its momentum in the AI and data centre markets.

In addition to the new GPU series, Huang also introduced Cosmos foundation models, which can generate photo-realistic video. Cosmos can thus, be used to train robots and self-driving cars at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

These models create synthetic training data, enabling robots and autonomous vehicles to understand the physical world just like how large language models assist chatbots in generating natural language responses.

Nvidia plans to release Cosmos under an "open license," taking inspiration from Meta’s approach for Llama 3 language models, which gained significant traction in the tech industry.

"We really hope (Cosmos) will do for the world of robotics and industrial AI what Llama 3 has done for enterprise AI," Huang said.

During his keynote address, Huang also outlined plans to bring the technology behind its high-performance AI data centre chips to consumer PCs and laptops. Huang unveiled its first desktop computer, Project DIGITS, designed specifically for programmers rather than general consumers. Priced at $3,000, the system runs on an Nvidia operating system based on Linux and features the same chip used in the company's data centre products.

CES 2025 is being held from January 7-10. The conference showcases innovations ranging from automotive technology to artificial intelligence applications.

On Monday, Nvidia stocks closed at record $149.43 on the NASDAQ, taking the company’s valuation at $3.66 trillion, making it world's second-most valuable listed company after Apple.