Nvidia CEO Huang says AI will drive scientific breakthroughs

During its SC24 Special Address in Atlanta, Nvidia (NVDA) announced a wave of AI and supercomputing tools set to revolutionize industries like biopharma and climate science. The announcements, delivered by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Vice President of Accelerated Computing Ian Buck, are rooted in the company’s deep history in transforming computing, the company said. “Supercomputers are among humanity’s most vital instruments, driving scientific breakthroughs and expanding the frontiers of knowledge,” Huang said. “Twenty-five years after creating the first GPU, we have reinvented computing and sparked a new industrial revolution.” Nvidia’s journey in accelerated computing began with CUDA in 2006 and the first GPU for scientific computing, Huang said. At SC24, Nvidia announced the new cuPyNumeric library, a GPU-accelerated implementation of NumPy, designed to supercharge applications in data science, machine learning and numerical computing. Nvidia also unveiled the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for real-time computer-aided engineering digital twins, a reference workflow designed to help developers create interactive digital twins for industries like aerospace, automotive, energy and manufacturing. In addition, in partnership with Google (GOOG), Nvidia’s CUDA-Q now powers detailed dynamical simulations of quantum processors, reducing weeks-long calculations to minutes. With the open-source release of BioNeMo Framework, NVIDIA is advancing AI-driven drug discovery as researchers gain powerful tools tailored specifically for pharmaceutical applications. The company also announced two new microservices – CorrDiff NIM and FourCastNet NIM – to accelerate climate change modeling and simulation results by up to 500x in the NVIDIA Earth-2 platform. As demand for AI systems like the Blackwell supercomputer grows, NVIDIA is scaling production through new Foxconn facilities in the U.S., Mexico and Taiwan. NVIDIA also announced the general availability of the NVIDIA H200 NVL, a PCIe GPU based on the NVIDIA Hopper architecture optimized for low-power, air-cooled data centers.