AI is getting better at thinking like a person. Nvidia says its upgraded platform makes it even better

Nvidia on Tuesday revealed more details about its next artificial intelligence chip platform, Blackwell Ultra, which it says will help apps reason and act on a user’s behalf – two capabilities that would take AI beyond chatbots further into real life.

Blackwell Ultra, which the company detailed at the its annual GTC conference, builds on Nvidia’s existing sought-after Blackwell chip. The additional computing power in the new Ultra version should make it easier for AI models to break complicated queries down into multiple steps and consider different options – in other words, reason, the company said.

Demand for AI chips has surged in the wake of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, fueling a massive surge in Nvidia share prices. Its chips fuel the data centers that power popular, power-hungry AI and cloud-powered services from companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

But the arrival of Chinese tech startup DeepSeek – whose R1 model sent shockwaves through Wall Street for its reasoning capabilities and supposedly low cost – sparked speculation that expensive hardware may not be necessary to run high-performing AI models. Nvidia, however, appears to be skirting such concerns, as evidenced by its January quarter earnings in which it breezed past Wall Street’s expectations.

Nvidia wants its chips to be central to the types of reasoning models that the Chinese tech startup helped popularize. It claims a DeepSeek R1 query that would have taken a minute and a half to answer on Nvidia’s previous-generation Hopper chip would only take 10 seconds with Blackwell Ultra.