GPUs have been called the rare Earth metals - even the gold - of artificial intelligence, because they're foundational for today's generative AI era.
Three technical reasons, and many stories, explain why that's so. Each reason has multiple facets well worth exploring, but at a high level:
GPUs employ parallel processing.
GPU systems scale up to supercomputing heights.
The GPU software stack for AI is broad and deep.
The net result is GPUs perform technical calculations faster and with greater energy efficiency than CPUs. That means they deliver leading performance for AI training and inference as well as gains across a wide array of applications that use accelerated computing.
In its recent report on AI, Stanford's Human-Centered AI group provided some context. GPU performance has increased roughly 7,000 times since 2003 and price per performance is 5,600 times greater, it reported.
A 2023 report captured the steep rise in GPU performance and price/performance. The report also cited analysis from Epoch, an independent research group that measures and forecasts AI advances.
GPUs are the dominant computing platform for accelerating machine learning workloads, and most (if not all) of the biggest models over the last five years have been trained on GPUs [they have] thereby centrally contributed to the recent progress in AI, Epoch said on its site.
A 2020 study assessing AI technology for the U.S. government drew similar conclusions.
We expect [leading-edge] AI chips are one to three orders of magnitude more cost-effective than leading-node CPUs when counting production and operating costs, it said.
NVIDIA GPUs have increased performance on AI inference 1,000x in the last ten years, said Bill Dally, the company's chief scientist in a keynote at Hot Chips, an annual gathering of semiconductor and systems engineers.
ChatGPT Spread the News ChatGPT provided a powerful example of how GPUs are great for AI. The large language model (LLM), trained and run on thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, runs generative AI services used by more than 100 million people.
Since its 2018 launch, MLPerf, the industry-standard benchmark for AI, has provided numbers that detail the leading performance of NVIDIA GPUs on both AI training and inference.
For example, NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips swept the latest round of inference tests. NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, inference software released since that test, delivers up to an 8x boost in performance and more than a 5x reduction in energy use and total cost of ownership. Indeed, NVIDIA GPUs have won every round of MLPerf training and inference tests since the benchmark was released in 2019.
In February, NVIDIA GPUs delivered leading results for inference, serving up thousands of inferences per second on the most demanding models in the STAC-ML Markets benchmark, a key technology performance gauge for the financial services industry.
A RedHat software engineering team put it succinctly in a blog: GPUs have become the foundation of artificial intelligence.
AI Under the Hood A brief look under the hood shows why GPUs and AI make a powerful pairing.
An AI model, also called a neural network, is essentially a mathematical lasagna, made from layer upon layer of linear algebra equations. Each equation represents the likelihood that one piece of data is related to another.
For their part, GPUs pack thousands of cores, tiny calculators working in parallel to slice through the math that makes up an AI model. This, at a high level, is how AI computing works.
Highly Tuned Tensor Cores Over time, NVIDIA's engineers have tuned GPU cores to the evolving needs of AI models. The latest GPUs include Tensor Cores that are 60x more powerful than the first-generation designs for processing the matrix math neural networks use.
In addition, NVIDIA Hopper Tensor Core GPUs include a Transformer Engine that can automatically adjust to the optimal precision needed to process transformer models, the class of neural networks that spawned generative AI.
Along the way, each GPU generation has packed more memory and optimized techniques to store an entire AI model in a single GPU or set of GPUs.
Models Grow, Systems Expand The complexity of AI models is expanding a whopping 10x a year.
The current state-of-the-art LLM, GPT4, packs more than a trillion parameters, a metric of its mathematical density. That's up from less than 100 million parameters for a popular LLM in 2018.
In a recent talk at Hot Chips, NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally described how single-GPU performance on AI inference expanded 1,000x in the last decade. GPU systems have kept pace by ganging up on the challenge. They scale up to supercomputers, thanks to their fast NVLink interconnects and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networks.
For example, the DGX GH200, a large-memory AI supercomputer, combines up to 256 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips into a single data-center-sized GPU with 144 terabytes of shared memory.
Each GH200 superchip is a single server with 72 Arm Neoverse CPU cores and four petaflops of AI performance. A new four-way Grace Hopper systems configuration puts in a single compute node a whopping 288 Arm cores and 16 petaflops of AI performance with up to 2.3 terabytes of high-speed memory.
And NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs announced in November pack up to 288 gigabytes of the latest HBM3e memory technology.
Software Covers the Waterfront An expanding ocean of GPU software has evolved since 2007 to enable every facet of AI, from deep-tech features to high-level applications.
The NVIDIA AI platform includes hundreds of software libraries and apps. The CUDA programming language and the cuDNN-X library for deep learning provide a base on top of which developers have created software like NVIDIA NeMo, a framework to let users build, customize and run inference on their o
North America Stories
29/01/2026
MELBOURNE, Fla., January 29, 2026 - L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) reports fu...
29/01/2026
Bluey' Wins Second Consecutive Top Streaming Title of the Year with 45 Billi...
29/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/01/2026
Boston Conservatory Orchestra Presents East Coast Premiere of Peter and Leonardo...
29/01/2026
Back to All News
Love is Blind: Sweden Returns for a Third Season - Premiering ...
29/01/2026
Back to All News
Unmask Bridgerton' Season 4 With Our Complete Coverage Guide
Yerin Ha as Sophie Baek and Luke Thompson as Benedict Bridgerton in Season ...
29/01/2026
Back to All News
Extraordinary Crime Mysteries, Mythical Worlds and High-Stakes...
29/01/2026
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
29/01/2026
Get ready to game - the native GeForce NOW app for Linux PCs is now available in beta, letting Linux desktops tap directly into GeForce RTX performance from the...
28/01/2026
Top L-R: The Liars, Jazz Infernal, Living with a Visionary
Second Row L-R: Paper Trail, The Baddest Speechwriter of All, Crisis Actor
Third Row: The Boys and ...
28/01/2026
Airlines, cruise and tour operators double down on ad spend as Australians' prioritise travel
Sydney January 28, 2026 - New Nielsen Ad Intel data shows a...
28/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/01/2026
Marshall Electronics launches the CV420-27X, its next-generation ultra-high-definition (UHD) IP camera, at ISE 2026 (Stand 4N900). Engineered for modern IP-base...
28/01/2026
Grass Valley has announced that Television Mobiles Ltd. (TVM), one of Europe's leading independent outside broadcast providers, has carried out a major refu...
28/01/2026
AI, graphics and virtual software power new production capabilities
FOR-A is bringing remarkable new technologies to FOMEX, the Future of Media Exhibition (ex...
28/01/2026
Continuing a longstanding collaboration, Riedel Communications and Nordic media technology company Media Tailor have once again joined forces to deliver a state...
28/01/2026
Pebble has appointed Paul Nagle-Smith as vice president for customer fulfilment, strengthening its senior leadership focus on customer delivery and operational ...
28/01/2026
Cloud playout solutions provider, Veset has announced that leading Mexican broadcaster, TV Azteca is using Veset Nimbus on AWS as a disaster recovery (DR) playo...
28/01/2026
Ensuring it can keep pace with a rapidly evolving live sports market, Balkan broadcast facility provider MVP Most Valuable Production has upgraded its flags...
28/01/2026
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud solutions provider that powers and protects life online, and Yospace, the leader in dynamic ad insertion tec...
28/01/2026
The renowned Reykjavik City Theatre (RCT) recently underwent a major intercom system upgrade using Clear-Com solutions. This milestone project utilizes Clear-C...
28/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
28/01/2026
Boston Conservatory Orchestra Premieres a New Piano Concerto by Peter and Leonar...
28/01/2026
Back to All News
Netflix's Kohrra Season 2 Unveils A Thrilling Whodunnit Tr...
28/01/2026
Back to All News
What Next? Netflix Presents the Latest German-Speaking Series,...
28/01/2026
Quantum technologies are rapidly emerging as foundational capabilities for economic competitiveness, national security and scientific leadership in the 21st cen...
28/01/2026
Back to All News
The Wait Is Over: Teaser Trailer Drops for Jo Nesbo's Dete...
28/01/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Announces a Fictional Miniseries Inspired by the Marta del Castillo Case
Entertainment
28 January 2026
GlobalSpain
Link copied to ...
28/01/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Announces Santiago Mitres New Film Starring Ver nica L...
28/01/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Unveils the Teaser Trailer for Berlin and the Lady wit...
27/01/2026
L-R: Jonathan Cuchacovich, Sonia Kennebeck, Alan Fischer, Daeil Kim, Andrew Sta...
27/01/2026
Nielsen will continue to drive growth and provide local audience measurement
in...
27/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Pinterest
Bluesky
Email...
27/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Pinterest
Bluesky
Email...
27/01/2026
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Pinterest
Bluesky
Email...
27/01/2026
Amagi Media Labs Limited, the only cloud-native SaaS provider offering end-to-end solutions across live production, content preparation, distribution, and monet...
27/01/2026
Miri Technologies Inc. today unveiled its V410 live 4K video encoder/decoder for streaming, IP-based production workflows and AV-over-IP distribution. Designed ...
27/01/2026
The Paul E. Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell in Massachusetts has chosen Ikegami cameras for incorporation into its broadcast-quality television production facili...
27/01/2026
SipRadius, specialists in secure, low latency media transport, will show the pro AV community its end-to-end solution for high quality content distribution and ...
27/01/2026
Hiltron will highlight the fruits of its 45-plus years of experience in satellite communications system integration and product development at the annual GovSat...
27/01/2026
Klvr will demonstrate how its Charger Pro solution is delivering cost reduction and performance benefits for live entertainment and pro AV markets at ISE 2026 (...
27/01/2026
Amino, a global media technology leader in enterprise video and digital signage, today announced that its Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2026 booth (4N700) wil...
GPUs have been called the rare Earth metals - even the gold - of artificial intelligence, because they're foundational for today's generative AI era.
