As Nvidia pushes for leadership in metaverse, here’s everything it announced at GTC 2021 – VentureBeat

At its 2021 GTC conference, today Nvidia, became the third tech giant to formally announce and detail plans to innovate for the metaverse.

The following is a recap of all major announcements the company made today, with links to VB’s coverage diving into each one in-depth.

Following on the heels of announcements from both Facebook and Microsoft, Nvidia revealed dozens of new tools and leaps forward in its already-developed technologies like GPUs, all designed with an eye toward solving top societal problems — like battling climate change and fighting forest fires —  in a virtual world like Nvidia’s AI Omniverse or the broader metaverse, and applying the solutions to the real world.

Ultimately, the major takeaway from Nvidia’s announcements is its intent to increase accessibility to AI technologies and immersive experiences available for any enterprise that wants to pursue innovation in these manners.

Becoming a full-stack company requires full-time focus and integration with the metaverse

The Santa Clara, California-based, $766 billion market cap company is a worldwide leader in graphics processors and media communications devices for both gaming and professional technologies.

At GTC 2021, the company repeatedly shared promises to innovate all of its technology resources for a faster, more efficient, and sustainable future. By transforming into a full-stack tech company, Nvidia can extend its resources and capabilities to further strengthen its already top-of-the-line products like GPUs, driverless automobiles, edge computing, and more — allowing it to perfect its assets and pursue innovation for the metaverse with full force.

Expanding its horizons to develop one of the world’s largest language models for enterprises to serve new domains and languages, building avatars to populate its intricate Omniverse, implementing, and optimizing the supply chain for more efficient deliveries (including speedier pizza deliveries), and even AI models that train systems to use the laws of physics to model the behavior of systems like climate science and protein engineering.

Today, Nvidia also detailed that it is expanding its LaunchPad program to ten new locations. LaunchPad is a worldwide initiative of the company to assist global enterprises with quickly determining proper AI requirements on the same stack they can purchase and deploy.

A history of industry leadership

Since the company’s founding in 1993, Nvidia has proven itself as one of the toughest tech competitors in the market. According to the company’s website, in 1993 there were more than two dozen companies in the graphic chip space. In just three years’ time, that number vastly expanded to around 70 different companies competing in this niche sector of the tech industry. However, by 2006, Nvidia outlasted them all and was the only independent one still operating.

Could Nvidia extend that independence and become a leader in the metaverse and AI spaces in the future? The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, seems to believe so. Tuesday, in his keynote speech, Huang announced major news that all of Nvidia’s tools, features, and technologies will be utilized for going forward: Earth 2, a digital twin of Earth itself. The news came with a promise to use technology innovations to save the world.

“We will build a digital twin to simulate and predict climate change,” Huang said in his streamed keynote speech. “This new supercomputer will be E2, Earth 2, the digital twin of Earth, running Modulus-created AI physics at a million times speeds in the Omniverse. All the technologies we’ve invented up to this moment are needed to make E2 possible. I can’t imagine greater and more important news.”

While the metaverse boom ramps up, only time will tell if Nvidia proves its fortitude once again and outlasts its competitors in this space.