Nvidia’s tiny $3,000 computer steals the show at CES
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks about Project Digits personal AI supercomputer for researchers and students during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 6, 2025. Gadgets, robots and vehicles imbued with artificial intelligence will once again vie for attention at the Consumer Electronics Show, as vendors behind the scenes will seek ways to deal with tariffs threatened by US President-elect Donald Trump. The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) opens formally in Las Vegas on January 7, 2025, but preceding days are packed with product announcements. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was greeted as a rock star this week CES in Las Vegas, following an artificial intelligence boom that’s made the chipmaker the second most-valuable company in the world.
At his nearly two-hour keynote on Monday kicking off the annual conference, Huang packed a 12,000-seat arena, drawing comparisons to the way Steve Jobs would reveal products at Apple events.
Huang concluded with an Apple-like trick: a surprise product reveal. He presented one of Nvidia’s server racks and, using some stage magic, held up a much smaller version, which looked like a tiny cube of a computer.
“This is an AI supercomputer,” Huang said, while donning an alligator skin leather jacket. “It runs the entire Nvidia AI stack. All of Nvidia’s software runs on this.”
Huang said the computer is called Project Digits and runs off a relative of the Grace Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) that are currently powering the most advanced AI server clusters. The GPU is paired with an ARM-based Grace central processing unit (CPU). Nvidia worked with Chinese semiconductor company MediaTek to create the system-on-a chip called GB10.
Formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is typically the spot to launch flashy and futuristic consumer gadgets. At this year’s show, which started on Tuesday and wraps up on Friday, several companies announced AI integrations with appliances, laptops and even grills. Other major announcements included a laptop from Lenovo which has a rollable screen that can expand vertically. There were also new robots, including a Roomba competitor with a robotic arm.
Unlike Nvidia’s traditional GPUs for gaming, Project Digits isn’t targeting consumers. instead, it’s aimed at machine learning researchers, smaller companies, and universities that want to developed advanced AI but don’t have the billions of dollars to build massive data centers or buy enough cloud credits.
“There’s a gaping hole for data scientists and ML researchers and who are actively working, who are actively building something,” Huang said. “Maybe you don’t need a giant cluster. You’re just developing the early versions of the model, and you’re iterating constantly. You could do it in the cloud, but it just costs a lot more money.”
The supercomputer will cost about $3,000 when it becomes available in May, Nvidia said, and will be available from the company itself as well as some of its manufacturing partners. Huang said Project Digits is a placeholder name, indicating it may change by the time the computer goes on sale.
“If you have a good name for it, reach out to us,” Huang said.
Diversifying its business
It’s a dramatically different kind of product from the GPUs that have driven Nvidia’s historic boom in the past two years. OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and other AI model creators like Anthropic have joined with large cloud providers in snapping up Nvidia’s data center GPUs because of their ability to power the most intensive models and computing workloads.
Data center sales accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s $35 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter.
Wall Street is focused on Nvidia’s ability to diversify its business so that it’s less reliant on a handful of customers buying massive AI systems.
The Nvidia Project Digits supercomputer during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025.
Bridget Bennett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“It was a little scary to see Nvidia come out with something so good for so little in price,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note this week. He said Nvidia may have “stolen the show,” due to Project Digits as well other announcements including graphics cards for gaming, new robot chips and a deal with Toyota.
Project Digits, which runs Linux and the same Nvidia software used on the company’s GPU server clusters, represents a huge increase in capabilities for researchers and universities, said David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Bader, who has worked on research projects with Nvidia in the past, said the computer appears to be able to handle enough data and information to train the biggest and most cutting-edge models. He told CNBC Anthropic, Google, Amazon and others “would pay $100 million to build a super computer for training” to get a system with these sorts of capabilities.
For $3,000, users can soon get a product they can plug into a standard electrical outlet in their home or office, Bader said. It’s particularly exciting for academics, who have often left for private industry in order to access bigger and more powerful computers, he said.
“Any student who is able to have one of these systems that cost roughly the same as a high-end laptop or gaming laptop, they’ll be able to do the same research and build the same models,” Bader said.
Reitzes said the computer may be Nvidia’s first move into the $50 billion market for PC and laptop chips.
“It’s not too hard to imagine it would be easy to just do it all themselves and allow the system to run Windows someday,” Reitzes wrote. “But I guess they don’t want to step on too many toes.”
Huang didn’t rule out that possibility when asked about it by Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.
He said that MediaTek may be able to sell the GB10 chip to other computer makers in the market. He made sure to leave some mystery in the air.
“Obviously, we have plans,” Huang said.
Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, gestures during the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave is set to make its Nasdaq debut on Friday. The company priced shares at $40 in its initial public offering on Thursday, raising $1.5 billion.
As a supplier to OpenAI, CoreWeave is among the beneficiaries of the rise of generative AI software such as the San Francisco AI startup’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022.
Microsoft provided cloud services to OpenAI but quickly called in CoreWeave, which rents out access to its hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units, to provide additional capacity. In 2024, 62% of CoreWeave’s $1.92 billion in revenue came from Microsoft.
But Microsoft is also a competitor, as are Amazon, Google and Oracle.
Few technology companies have joined stock exchanges since late 2021, when investors became more cautious about inflation, leading central banks to raise interest rates. That in turn made unprofitable companies less attractive.
There were been just 13 venture-backed technology IPOs in 2022, 2023 and 2024, compared with 77 in 2021, according to data from Jay Ritter, an emeritus professor of finance at the University of Florida.
CoreWeave reported a $863 million net loss in 2024, but it was in growth mode, with revenue growing 737% year over year. It had raised almost $13 billion in debt as of Dec. 31, with much of that allocated for GPUs that go inside the company’s leased data centers in the U.S. and abroad.
The technology industry can now boast the largest U.S. IPO since automation software maker UiPath‘s $1.57 billion New York Stock Exchange debut in 2021. Still, CoreWeave downsized its offering to 37.5 million shares from 49 million and priced below the initial range of $47 to $55 each.
Since CoreWeave filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 3, digital physical therapy company Hinge Health and Swedish online lender Klarna have done the same. Discord, which runs popular chat software, has hired banks for an IPO, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
CoreWeave’s arrival on Nasdaq might inspire other AI companies to go public, too. An “AI parade” might be on the way, Mark Klein, CEO of SuRo Capital, which invests in private companies, told CNBC earlier.
Data analytics company Databricks, which partly generates revenue by running AI models on behalf of clients, announced a funding round at a $62 billion valuation in December. OpenAI, for its part, was in talks to raise money at a $340 billion valuation as of January.
CoreWeave was founded in 2017 and is based in Livingston, New Jersey, with 881 employees at the end of 2024. Before CoreWeave’s IPO, Michael Intrator, the company’s co-founder and CEO, controlled 38% of its voting power, while Nvidia held 1%. Other investors include Fidelity and Magnetar.
WATCH: The slowdown of the AI buzzword momentum trade will hurt CoreWeave, says NYU’s Aswath Damodaran
CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator said Friday that the company’s IPO pricing, which came in below expectations, has to be placed in the larger context of the macroenvironment.
“There’s a lot of headwinds in the macro,” Intrator said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “And we definitely had to scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was.”
The company, which provides access to Nvidia graphics processing units for artificial intelligence training and workloads, priced its IPO at $40 a share, below the initial $47 to $55 per share filing. The stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol “CRWV.”
The lower price provided enough of a discount to the replacement value that investors could feel comfortable buying, sources familiar with the offering told CNBC’s Leslie Picker. Replacement value is the value of the company’s assets at the present time.
About 10-15 long-only and strategic investors made up the majority of the backing group, the sources said.
“We believe that as the public markets get to know us, get to know how we execute, get to know how we build our infrastructure, get to know how we build our client relationships and the incredible capacity of our solutions, the company will be very successful,” Intrator said.
Nvidia is anchoring the deal with a $250 million order, CNBC reported Thursday.
CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion at the $40 per share price, giving it a non-diluted valuation of around $19 billion.
Intrator said the company will use the money to pay down debt and for expansion.
The company held nearly $8 billion in debt at the end of 2024.
CoreWeave was also bolstered by the recent market action triggered by DeepSeek, which pushed the company to “build bigger” and “build faster,” Intrator said.
“One of the things that’s made us incredibly effective is we take a really long-term view of where this space is going,” he said.
“Our customers are telling us, universally, to continue to build – we cannot keep up with the scale.”
Intrator also addressed administrative issues with a loan last year in which the company faced technical defaults.
The company started to use money from the $7.6 billion loan for scaling in Europe, The Financial Times reported.
Intrator said the company self-reported the “misstep” in its S-1 and quickly addressed it with the lenders.
“Those lenders proceeded to go ahead and continue to lend us hundreds of millions of dollars after all of these issues,” he said.
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