Nvidia releases gaming chips for PCs, tapping AI features from data center GPUs
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder, president and CEO, speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2024.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Nvidia revealed new chips for desktop and laptop PCs on Monday that use the same Blackwell architecture underpinning the company’s fastest AI processors for servers and data centers.
The chips, called GeForce RTX 50-series, will come pre-installed in computers ranging from about $550 to $2,000, the company said. Laptops with the chips will start shipping in March.
Nvidia unveiled the processors at CES in Las Vegas, where CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote address on Monday.
“Can you imagine, you have this incredible graphics card, Blackwell, I’m going to shrink it and put it in there,” Huang said, holding up a laptop.
Nvidia, which has soared past $3.5 trillion in market cap by selling AI chips to giant cloud vendors and other tech companies, was until the last few years known for selling graphics processing units (GPUs) to power video games. Nvidia’s first chip in late 1999 was designed to draw triangles and polygons quickly for 3D games.
“Of course, back then, we were a gaming company, and these GPUs were created to accelerate games,” Justin Walker, senior director of product at Nvidia, said on a press call.
Wall Street is less enthused about Nvidia’s gaming business these days given the explosion in AI and ever-increasing demand for more processing power. In the quarter that ended in October, Nvidia’s gaming sales accounted for under 10% of total revenue, compared to 88% from data center chips.
Nvidia has the vast majority of the AI GPU market for data centers, outpacing rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
But CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is all about consumer products, and the new chips announced Monday are primarily intended for gaming.
Nvidia says the RTX 50-series chips will support a feature called DLSS 4 that uses AI to boost gaming frame rates. They also can display character faces with more details, and will generally provide users with better graphics and higher resolution.
Nvidia’s gaming business is growing, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier in the latest quarter. But data center sales have at least doubled for six straight quarters, topping $30 billion in the most recent period.
Nvidia says that technical improvements made for its massive AI business will trickle down into its graphics cards for games.
“While we are now an AI company as well as a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits tremendously from the fact that we are an AI company,” Walker said.
The Blackwell GPU architecture and core design that the 50-series chips use debuted in the company’s AI accelerators, which were announced in March and started shipping later last year. Nvidia said they were designed and optimized to run neural networks used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The new chips for PCs and laptops will come in a number of different configurations. The company says the most expensive and powerful of the chips, the RTX 5090, will be sold individually for $1,999 and is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090. Nvidia says it has 92 billion transistors, versus 208 billion transistors on the company’s B200 GPU for servers.
Nvidia says the chips will be optimized to run AI models and do computer graphics, not just run the latest games. The chips will be powerful enough for some game makers to integrate generative AI into their characters in games like “PUBG: Battlegrounds.”
The new processors will also will be powerful enough to to run large language models and image generation models from companies including Meta, Mistral and Stability AI, Nvidia said.
WATCH: Bernstein’s Rasgon says investors need Nvidia exposure
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta shares hit a record high on Monday, underscoring investor interest in the company’s new AI superintelligence group.
The company’s shares reached $747.90 during midday trading, topping Meta’s previous stock market record in February when it began laying off the 5% of its workforce that it deemed “low performers.”
Meta joins Microsoft and Nvidia among tech megacaps that have reached new highs of late, all closing at records Monday. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla remain below their all-time highs reached late last year or early this year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on an AI hiring blitz amid fierce competition with rivals such as OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Earlier in June, Meta said it would hire Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into the executive’s data labeling and annotation startup.
The social media company also hired Nat Friedman and his business partner, Daniel Gross, the chief of Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup with a valuation of $32 billion, CNBC reported on June 19. Meta’s attempts to buy Safe Superintelligence were rebuffed by the startup’s founder and AI expert Ilya Sutskever, the report noted.
Wang and Friedman are the leaders of Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs, tasked with overseeing the company’s artificial intelligence foundation models, projects and research, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The term superintelligence refers to technology that exceeds human capability.
Bloomberg News first reported about the new superintelligence unit.
Meta has also snatched AI researchers from OpenAI. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said during a podcast that Meta was offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s technology chief, spoke about the social media company’s AI hiring spree during a June 20 interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime,” saying that the talent market is “really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive.”
An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation flies near the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Joby Aviation stock soared about 12% as the flying air taxi maker got closer to launching a service in the United Arab Emirates.
The electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, company said Monday that it delivered its first aircraft to the UAE and has completed piloted flight tests as it readies for a 2026 launch in the region.
“Our flights and operational footprint in Dubai are a monumental step toward weaving air taxi services into the fabric of daily life worldwide,” said founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt in a release. He called the Middle East nation a “launchpad for a global revolution in how we move.”
Joby’s planned launch in the UAE was announced in February 2024 as part of an agreement with Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority. The deal included exclusive rights to conduct air taxi service in Dubai for six years.
As part of the project, Joby said in November that it began building one vertiport at Dubai International Airport, with three additional locations slated for Palm Jumeirah and Dubai’s downtown and marina. Joby also announced an air taxi agreement with three Abu Dhabi government departments in 2024.
The California-based company has made other expansion moves in the Middle East. Shares jumped earlier this month after Saudi Arabian firm Abdul Latif Jameel announced a roughly $1 billion investment for up to 300 eVTOLs. The firm participated in Joby’s Series C funding round.
Joby shares have surged more than 32% this year, swelling its market capitalization to over $9 billion.
Demand for air taxis, which take off and land similar to helicopters, has gained momentum in recent years. The service faces regulatory and safety hurdles but has been lauded for its ability to cut traffic congestion and slash emissions.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included a pilot program for testing electric air taxis.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Oracle shares jumped more than 5% after a recent filing showed a cloud deal that would add over $30 billion annually.
CEO Safra Catz is slated to share the deal news at a company meeting Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The revenues are expected to start hitting in the 2028 fiscal year.
“Oracle is off to a strong start in FY26,” Catz is expected to say, according to the filing. “Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28.”
The deals revealed Monday by Catz will not affect the company’s 2026 guidance, according to the filing.
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