FirstFT: Nvidia unveils AI ‘superchip’

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Nvidia has unveiled its latest artificial intelligence chips, which the company claims are far more powerful than its existing market-leading hardware, as it sets its sights on extending its dominance in the burgeoning industry.

Chief executive Jensen Huang yesterday said Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing units — with 208bn transistors compared with 80bn in last year’s H100 — would massively increase the computing power driving large language models.

Nvidia’s GB200 “superchip” combines two of the Blackwell GPUs with the company’s existing “Grace” central processing unit, which has powered the growth of generative AI.

Huang said the chip was twice as powerful when it came to training AI models and had five times their capability when it came to “inference” — the speed at which AI models such as ChatGPT can respond to queries.

“The inference capability of Blackwell is off the charts,” he said, adding that there was “unbelievable excitement” about it. Read more about Nvidia’s superchip.

And here’s what I’m keeping tabs on today:

• Economic data: The EU releases its labour cost index for the fourth quarter of 2023, Zew reports on economic sentiment in Germany and Spain publishes its competitiveness guarantee index for January.

• US elections: California holds special primary voting for the vacated congressional seat of the Republican former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Follow the FT’s full coverage by subscribing to the US Election Countdown newsletter here.

• Results: Close Brothers, Commerzbank, DFS Furniture, Essentra, Harworth, Sabre Insurance, Trustpilot and Wickes report.

Join Financial Times colleagues on March 21 at 1200 GMT for a subscriber webinar on the Israel-Hamas war, fears of a wider conflict and the chance of a long-term settlement. Register now and put your questions to the panel.

Five more top stories

1. Exclusive: Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz plans to vote for Donald Trump, saying his assessment that President Joe Biden’s “mental condition is really scary” outweighed his concern over the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The founder of $10bn investment firm Trian Partners told the FT that the litany of criminal charges against the former president amounted to a “miscarriage of justice”, helping to make the activist investor a likely Trump voter in November.

• ‘Tale of two economies’: The economy of the battleground state of Georgia is booming, but Biden, the president who has overseen this bonanza, is getting little credit.

2. The EU is preparing to levy tariffs on grain imports from Russia and Belarus to placate farmers and some member states, the first restriction on food products since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The European Commission is expected to impose a €95-per-tonne duty on cereals, increasing prices by at least 50 per cent. Tariffs of 50 per cent would also be placed on oil seeds and derived products. Read more on Brussels’ plans to restrict Russian and Belarusian grain imports.

• Russian politics: As Vladimir Putin trumpeted a record turnout for his re-election, most voters in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria skipped the polls. Here’s why.

3. Exclusive: Bill Gates’ TerraPower plans to start building the first of a new generation of nuclear power plants in the US in June, joining a race with Russian and Chinese rivals to develop and export lower-cost reactors. TerraPower’s chief executive said his company would apply for a construction permit from US regulators this month for its Natrium-branded reactor, which is cooled with liquid sodium and could be built for about half the cost of standard water-cooled reactors. Read more from Chris Levesque’s interview with the FT.

4. A second successive jump in the UK minimum wage will keep the Bank of England on high alert for signs of pay growth feeding inflation, even as broader price pressures in the economy start to ebb. In April, the main hourly rate of the statutory National Living Wage will rise 9.8 per cent to £11.44 — the sharpest increase since 2001. Economists said the effects on falling price growth could be one reason why the BoE may wait longer than other central banks before cutting rates.

5. The capital of one of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most mineral-rich regions is being “asphyxiated” as armed rebels close in on the city, aid agencies and analysts have warned. The M23 rebel group controls almost all supply routes into Goma, sending the price of basic commodities rocketing in a conflict that threatens to explode into a wider regional war. Read more about what a UN representative called a “really catastrophic” situation.

The Big Read

Since late July, when US regulators unveiled plans that they say will make banks safer, the issue of bank capital rules has been forced into the mainstream like never before, with adverts opposing the rules popping up in podcasts and television shows. Critics warn of dire consequences for “everyday Americans” if authorities push ahead with what they have apocalyptically termed “Basel Endgame”, while advocates of the new rules, which are stricter than globally agreed standards, say the concerns are overblown.

We’re also reading . . .

• Artificial intelligence: Too little attention is being paid to how AI could transform the state, writes Stephen Bush. While it might never be cheap enough to replace you at work, it is already changing how you are governed.

• EU capital markets: Companies providing tomorrow’s solutions — from green energy to AI — must have access to enough financing within the bloc, writes Mairead McGuinness, EU commissioner for financial services, financial stability and capital markets union.

• Money Clinic 🎧: Claer Barrett speaks to experts about the true cost of childcare and how investing in this “essential infrastructure” could boost the UK economy.

Chart of the day

The world’s biggest oil and gas companies are expanding a satellite monitoring campaign to detect methane emissions in emerging economies. The move comes after the detection of 26 large leaks of the planet-warming gas over Kazakhstan, Egypt and Algeria. However, a report published last week by the International Energy Agency found that the US — the largest global producer of oil and gas — was the largest emitter, closely followed by Russia.

Take a break from the news

Can a cream make your skin happy? Christine d’Ornano, global vice-president of Sisley Paris and co-creator of the new skincare brand Neuraé, thinks so. Neuraé is betting big on the emerging science of “neurocosmetics”, the cosmetic field based on the brain-skin connection and how our emotions affect our skin. “It’s a whole new way of treating the skin,” said d’Ornano. “We are just at the beginning.”

Additional contributions from Benjamin Wilhelm