Nvidia's eyeing up ways to beef up its future AI chips with GPUs on top of GPUs and the power of light

Images of Nvidia's Blackwell GPU from GTC.

I'm not usually one for extravagant tech and hardware predictions—things can change so much and so unpredictably that it's difficult to put too much weight behind such premonitions. But when it comes to AI tech, things move so quickly that what seems distant might not actually be too far away. Combine this with Nvidia being the one outlining the futuristic vision, and I take it a little more seriously.

Nvidia's latest prediction, as outlined at the IEDM 2024 conference according to Dr. Ian Cutress (via TechPowerUp), is AI accelerators that are 3D-stacked and that use—at least in part—silicon photonics for data transmission. This is, as Cutress puts it, Nvidia's vision of "the future of AI compute".