Next week, Nvidia will give developers an early look at a new AI processor

It's the company's annual developer conference, which takes place in person for the first time since the pandemic started. About twice as many individuals who attended the 2019 exhibition in person are expected to attend Nvidia's GTC event, with 16,000 expected to do so.

$400 billion separates Nvidia from overtaking Apple as Wall Street's most valuable business, with Microsoft leading the stock market. Nvidia's market capitalization surpassed $2 trillion in late February.

Analysts predict that when businesses buy up Nvidia's top-of-the-line processors by the tens of thousands to power chatbots, picture generators, and other AI systems, the company's sales will rise 81% this year to $110 billion.

That is twice as much as experts had predicted for Intel, the semiconductor manufacturer that drove the personal computer industry. Whether Nvidia can leverage its recent, significant lead in AI computing to establish long-term supremacy in a new computer era is the question.

The B100, or Nvidia's next generation of high-end AI chip, is expected to be at the centre of that endeavour, according to experts. The chip, which is expected to begin delivering later this year, will be the brains behind the AI systems that Nvidia offers.

Software engineers must wait months to use AI-optimized machines at cloud providers due to a shortage of Nvidia's current AI processors.

Pricing details are unlikely to come from Nvidia, but the B100 is probably going to be more expensive than its predecessor, which retails for over $20,000.

In an effort to keep developers dependent on Nvidia processors, Nvidia is also expected to release several improvements to its CUDA software, which gives programmers the ability to run their AI applications on Nvidia chips. CUDA makes it more difficult to move from internal processors provided by Microsoft and Google to those sold by competitors like Advanced Micro Devices.

Analysts are keeping an eye on how Nvidia develops its initiative to provide developers with cloud-based access to its processors and software, which it began selling last year.

(Sources: investing.com, reuters.com)