NVIDIA ranked No. 1 on Forbes magazine’s new list — America’s Best Companies — based on more than 60 measures in nearly a dozen categories that cover financial performance, customer and employee satisfaction, sustainability, remote work policies and more.
Forbes stated that the company thrived in numerous areas, “particularly employee satisfaction, earning high ratings in career opportunities, company benefits and culture,” as well as financial strength.
About 2,000 of the largest public companies in the U.S. were eligible, with 300 making the list.
Beau Davidson, vice president of employee experience at NVIDIA, told Forbes that the company has created systemic opportunities to listen to its staff (such as quarterly surveys, CEO Q&As and a virtual suggestion box) and then takes action on concerns ranging from benefits to cafe snacks.
NVIDIA has also championed Free Days — two days each quarter where the entire company closes. “It allows us to take a break as a company,” Davidson told Forbes. NVIDIA provides counselors onsite and a careers week that provides programs and training for workers to pursue internal job opportunities.
NVIDIA enjoys a low rate of employee turnover — widely viewed as a sign of employee happiness, according to People Data Labs, Forbes’ data provider on workforce stability.
For a full list of rankings, view Forbes’ America’s Best Companies 2025 list.
Check out the NVIDIA Careers page and learn more about NVIDIA Life.
]]>On a weekday afternoon, Ashwini Ashtankar sat on the bank of the Doodhpathri River, in a valley nestled in the Himalayas. Taking a deep breath, she noticed that there was no city noise, no pollution — and no work emails.
Ashtankar, a senior tools development engineer in NVIDIA’s Pune, India, office, took advantage of the company’s free days — two extra days off per quarter when the whole company disconnects from work — to recharge. Free days are fully paid by NVIDIA, not counted as vacation or as personal time off, and are in addition to country-specific holidays and time-away programs.
Free days give employees time to take an adventure, a breather — or both. Ashtankar and her husband, Dipen Sisodia — also an NVIDIAN — spent it outdoors, hiking up a mountain, playing in snow and exploring forests and lush green meadows.
“My free days give me time to focus on myself and recharge,” said Ashtankar. “We didn’t take our laptops. We were able to completely disconnect, like all NVIDIANs were doing at the same time.”
Ashtankar returned to work feeling refreshed and recharged, she said. Her team tests software features of NVIDIA products, focusing on GPU display drivers and the GeForce NOW game-streaming service, to make sure bugs are found and addressed before a product reaches customers.
“I take pride in tackling challenges with the highest level of quality and creativity, all in support of delivering the best products to our customers,” she said. “To do that, sometimes the most productive thing we can do is rest and let the soul catch up with the body.”
Ashtankar plans to build her career at NVIDIA for many years to come.
“I’ve never heard of another company that truly cares this much about its employees,” she said.
Learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.
]]>NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang on Friday encouraged Caltech graduates to pursue their craft with dedication and resilience — and to view setbacks as new opportunities.
“I hope you believe in something. Something unconventional, something unexplored. But let it be informed, and let it be reasoned, and dedicate yourself to making that happen,” he said. “You may find your GPU. You may find your CUDA. You may find your generative AI. You may find your NVIDIA.”
Trading his signature leather jacket for black and yellow academic regalia, Huang addressed the nearly 600 graduates at their commencement ceremony in Pasadena, Calif., starting with the tale of the computing industry’s decades-long evolution to reach this pivotal moment of AI transformation.
“Computers today are the single most important instrument of knowledge, and it’s foundational to every single industry in every field of science,” Huang said. “As you enter industry, it’s important you know what’s happening.”
He shared how, over a decade ago, NVIDIA — a small company at the time — bet on deep learning, investing billions of dollars and years of engineering resources to reinvent every computing layer.
“No one knew how far deep learning could scale, and if we didn’t build it, we’d never know,” Huang said. Referencing the famous line from Field of Dreams — if you build it, he will come — he said, “Our logic is: If we don’t build it, they can’t come.”
Looking to the future, Huang said, the next wave of AI is robotics, a field where NVIDIA’s journey resulted from a series of setbacks.
He reflected on a period in NVIDIA’s past when the company each year built new products that “would be incredibly successful, generate enormous amounts of excitement. And then one year later, we were kicked out of those markets.”
These roadblocks pushed NVIDIA to seek out untapped areas — what Huang refers to as “zero-billion-dollar markets.”
“With no more markets to turn to, we decided to build something where we are sure there are no customers,” Huang said. “Because one of the things you can definitely guarantee is where there are no customers, there are also no competitors.”
Robotics was that new market. NVIDIA built the first robotics computer, Huang said, processing a deep learning algorithm. Over a decade later, that pivot has given the company the opportunity to create the next wave of AI.
“One setback after another, we shook it off and skated to the next opportunity. Each time, we gain skills and strengthen our character,” Huang said. “No setback that comes our way doesn’t look like an opportunity these days.”
Huang stressed the importance of resilience and agility as superpowers that strengthen character.
“The world can be unfair and deal you with tough cards. Swiftly shake it off,” he said, with a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of Taylor Swift’s biggest hits. “There’s another opportunity out there — or create one.”
Huang concluded by sharing a story from his travels to Japan, where, as he watched a gardener painstakingly tending to Kyoto’s famous moss garden, he realized that when a person is dedicated to their craft and prioritizes doing their life’s work, they always have plenty of time.
“Prioritize your life,” he said, “and you will have plenty of time to do the important things.”
Main image courtesy of Caltech.
]]>When she was five years old, Veronica Miller (née Teklai) and her family left their homeland of Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa, to escape an ongoing war with Ethiopia and create a new life in the U.S.
She grew up in East Orange, New Jersey, watching others judge her parents and turn them away from jobs they were qualified for because of their appearance, their accented English or their unfamiliar names.
After working in the shipping industry for 20 years, Miller’s dad eventually became a New York City cab driver, an often-dangerous job in the 1980s. Her mom, despite earning a computer science degree in the U.S., trained to become a home health aide, where jobs were more available.
“My parents’ resilience and courage made my life possible,” Miller said.
After graduating from Ramapo College of New Jersey with a degree in international business, Miller worked at large automotive companies in client support, production support and project management.
Now working as a technical program manager in product security at NVIDIA, she feels like her family’s journey has come full circle.
“It’s the honor of my life being here at NVIDIA: I’m the proudest refugee,” she said.
In her role, Miller functions like a conductor in an orchestra. She works with engineers to bridge gaps and understand challenges to define solutions — always trying to create opportunities to turn a “no” into a “yes” through collaboration.
At NVIDIA, Miller feels like she can be herself, helping her thrive. She no longer feels the pressure to conform to fit in, allowing her creativity to flow freely and solve problems.
“Previously in my career, I never wore my hair curly. After someone once asked to touch my curly hair, I believed it would be easier to make myself look like everyone else. I thought it was the best way to let my work be the focus instead of my hair,” she said. “NVIDIA is the first employer that encouraged me to bring my full self to work.”
Outside of work, Miller and her husband, Nathan, are passionate about paying it forward and helping local youth in Trenton, New Jersey. Together, they’ve developed The Miller Family Foundation to help with community needs, including education. The foundation’s scholarship fund has donated $20,000 to low-income high school students to provide support for college tuition and career mentorship.
“I truly believe anyone could get here. There wasn’t anyone that showed me the path. It was belief in myself, a ton of research and endless hard work,” she said. “We’re in a special place where my husband and I can give the next generation some of the financial support and career guidance we didn’t have.”
Learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.
]]>NVIDIA jumped to No. 3 on the latest list of America’s 100 Best Companies to Work For by Fortune magazine and Great Place to Work.
It’s the company’s eighth consecutive year and highest ranking yet on the widely followed list, published today, which more than a thousand businesses vie to land on. NVIDIA ranked sixth last year.
“Since the COVID pandemic, employees are increasingly prioritizing work-life balance, mission alignment and empathetic workplaces,” Fortune wrote, with hotelier Hilton taking the top spot, followed by Cisco.
“Even as the broader tech sector has shed tens of thousands of jobs, NVIDIA continued its remarkable streak of nearly 15 years without any layoffs,” Fortune noted in its writeup. NVIDIA also was cited for the company’s “flat structure,” which encourages employees to solve problems quickly and collaboratively through projects.
Survey Says: 97% Are Proud to Share They Work at NVIDIA
To identify the top 100, Fortune conducted a detailed employee survey with Great Place to Work that received more than 1.3 million responses from people in the U.S. The survey showed that 97% of NVIDIANs are proud to tell others where they work.
While many tech companies faced a challenging 2023, with an uncertain economy and several of the biggest employers laying off thousands of workers, NVIDIA focused on managing costs, encouraging innovation and offering unique benefits and compensation that supported employees.
Learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.
]]>For some NVIDIANs, it’s always game day.
Our Santa Clara-based software quality assurance team boasts some of the world’s top gamers, whose search for bugs and errors is as strategic as their battle plans for toppling top-tier opponents in video games.
Two team members of the QA team — friendly colleagues in the office but fierce rivals in the esports arena — recently competed against one another at the finals of the Guildhouse Fighters tournament, a local circuit in Northern California.
Eduardo “PR Balrog” Perez-Frangie, a veteran Street Fighter player, fought his way to the Grand Final to face Miky “Samurai” Chea.
Perez-Frangie came out on top, but there was a twist: he’d brought to the contest his two-year-old son, who fell asleep on his father’s chest mid-match. “I played the rest of the game with a deadweight in my lap,” he said.
A Competitive Spirit
Perez-Frangie has competed for 15 years in a series of fighting game titles, including Marvel vs. Capcom, Killer Instinct and Mortal Kombat. He was part of the Evil Geniuses esports organization when he joined NVIDIA almost a decade ago but now plays without a sponsor so he can enjoy more family time.
He’s played against Chea in esports events for years, and they’re just as competitive in the office as in the stadiums.
“Even when we’re in the test environment, when we’re looking for bugs, we are competitive,” Perez-Frangie said. “But Miky stays calm — he was a teacher, so he can put everyone in their place.”
Chea’s days teaching kindergarten through eighth grade in Fresno, California, are behind him, but the coaching aspect of his current gaming-related role reminds him of the classroom — a place to share insights and takeaways.
As new games are released and older ones updated, “the hardware and software stack needs to work in harmony,” Chea said. “Our pro gaming team is the last line of defense to ensure our customers have the best gaming experience possible.”
QA team member DaJuan “Shroomed” McDaniel is a top-ranked Super Smash Bros. Melee player whose signature characters are Sheik and Marth. He’s also widely considered to be the best Dr. Mario player of all time.
“Being a competitive gamer, visual fidelity is so important,” McDaniel said. “We can see and feel visual anomalies, frame discrepancies, general latency and anything that’s off in ways that others won’t see.”
A Winning Formula
Alyssa Ruiz joined the QA team a year ago, initially testing drivers as part of the pro gaming team before switching to testing NVIDIA DLSS, a suite of neural rendering techniques that use deep learning to improve image quality and performance.
Introduced to gaming by her brothers through Halo 3, she later dedicated hours to Fortnite before deciding to stream the gameplay directly from her console. She posted the content to TikTok and began playing in online tournaments. By then, her game of choice was Riot Games’ Valorant.
“The game has a large female player base with visually appealing graphics and an engrossing storyline,” she said. “It can be more complex than a fighting game because it relies on a combination of abilities with strategies. It’s also a team game, so if someone isn’t pulling their weight, it’s a loss for all of us.”
That’s not unlike the team dynamic in the office.
Each member brings their own specialties to the testing environment, where they’re using their keen eyes to scrutinize DLSS technologies.
Their acute awareness of game latency and image fidelity — honed through hundreds of hours of gameplay — means the team can achieve better test coverage all around.
“We’re all very competitive, but there’s a real diversity that contributes to a stronger team,” Ruiz said. “And we all get along really well.”
Learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.
]]>NVIDIA continues to be among America’s very best places to work as judged by employees themselves, rising to second place on Glassdoor’s list of best employers for 2024.
This is the fourth consecutive year NVIDIA has been among the top five on the closely watched list, which is based on anonymous employee reviews about their job, company and work environment. Last year, NVIDIA ranked fifth.
Topping this year’s list is Bain & Co., with ServiceNow, MathWorks and Procore Technologies rounding out the top five.
Employees consistently share positive feedback about NVIDIA via Glassdoor’s anonymous reviews, which capture an authentic look at what it’s like to work at more than a million companies.
Some 98% of NVIDIANs approve of founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s leadership and 94% would recommend working at NVIDIA to a friend.
Here are some typical comments submitted by employees:
- “NVIDIA is the best company you could possibly work for,” wrote one engineer on the site. “Employees are basically provided with every single thing they need to be able to do their life’s work at NVIDIA. I might just work here for the rest of my life and retire from here.”
- “Truly, I have never worked at a place like NVIDIA,” another wrote. “The culture is strong, morale is high, teams are supportive of each other and employees love their work.”
- “NVIDIA hires great people — in every discipline where we work, we have world-class experts and a deep bench. NVIDIA has a culture of help; nobody fails alone and we succeed together,” another noted.
Learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.
]]>A calendar packed with meetings, calls and lab visits may sound like a typical workday for many — but for Luca Lofranco, whose greatest wish was to experience what it’s like to work at NVIDIA, it was a dream come true.
Eighteen-year-old Lofranco recently traveled from his hometown near Toronto, Canada, to spend the day at our Santa Clara campus, supported by Make-A-Wish, a nonprofit that grants life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses. The wish from Lofranco, who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was the fifth NVIDIA has been a part of in the last decade.
The NVIDIA team kept the day’s agenda a secret — surprising Lofranco with tours of the demo room and robotics lab, a chat with the University Recruiting team, a ride in a self-driving car and a video call with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. An aspiring computer science major, Lofranco was stoked for it all because, as his mom Cassandra shared, “NVIDIA is his Disneyland.”
A Long-Time NVIDIA Fan
After attending his first computer science summer camp when he was eight, Lofranco learned 3D modeling in Autodesk Maya, programming in Python, as well as 3D printing. His budding interest in tech grew and, soon enough, he was building his own gaming rigs.
NVIDIA quickly became Lofranco’s favorite tech company, he said, so much so that he carved the company logo out of a piece of wood using a computer numerical control machine.
For gaming, he enjoys using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs. But Lofranco’s ultimate draw to NVIDIA wasn’t its products but its culture.
“Everyone is driven to see the same outcome and comes together to make it happen,” he said. “Everything is designed for collaboration.”
A VIP Experience
Ahead of Lofranco’s visit, the NVIDIA team sent him a box of swag — including a hoodie, a hat and a custom NVIDIA badge.
Once he arrived on campus, NVIDIA volunteers welcomed and whisked Lofranco off on a campus tour, followed by a meeting with the solutions architect team, which includes NVIDIANs focused on healthcare, auto, AI, cloud service providers and large language models.
Next, a visit to the robotics lab helped satisfy Lofranco’s “maker” curiosity. He saw an NVIDIA DGX Station as well as test robots for developing the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform, and was soon directing a robot arm to stack colored blocks.
After learning that Lofranco’s favorite foods include lobster, tiramisu and Kit Kat candy bars, the café team prepared a special menu for him and all employees in the office that day. Everyone enjoyed a lobster roll pop-up station in the campus park and tiramisu-flavored ice cream with assorted toppings, including Kit Kat pieces.
Innovators
On a visit to the demo room at NVIDIA’s Santa Clara site, Lofranco and his father revealed that they tinker with innovations themselves. They programmed their water heater in the family hot tub to maintain a comfortable temperature and decrease the time needed to warm it — all thanks to Python code and Raspberry Pi experimentation.
With so much to soak in, Lofranco described his wish day at NVIDIA as “unfathomable” — and that was before his video call with Huang, which stretched from a planned quarter hour to 45 minutes.
After a conversation that spanned NVIDIA’s origins, many near failures and innovation, Huang gifted Lofranco a GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition GPU and shared some sound advice: “Keep playing video games — but make sure to prioritize your homework.”
Capping a packed day of fun-filled support from nearly 50 NVIDIANs was a visit to the auto lab and a spin in one of NVIDIA’s self-driving test cars.
How was it all? “Breathtaking,” said Lofranco, who learned firsthand from Huang that while NVIDIA has evolved from being the underdog to a leading tech company, it still feels “like a family.”
Learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.
]]>In a talk, now available online, NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally describes a tectonic shift in how computer performance gets delivered in a post-Moore’s law era.
Each new processor requires ingenuity and effort inventing and validating fresh ingredients, he said in a recent keynote address at Hot Chips, an annual gathering of chip and systems engineers. That’s radically different from a generation ago, when engineers essentially relied on the physics of ever smaller, faster chips.
The team of more than 300 that Dally leads at NVIDIA Research helped deliver a whopping 1,000x improvement in single GPU performance on AI inference over the past decade (see chart below).
It’s an astounding increase that IEEE Spectrum was the first to dub “Huang’s Law” after NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. The label was later popularized by a column in the Wall Street Journal.
The advance was a response to the equally phenomenal rise of large language models used for generative AI that are growing by an order of magnitude every year.
“That’s been setting the pace for us in the hardware industry because we feel we have to provide for this demand,” Dally said.
In his talk, Dally detailed the elements that drove the 1,000x gain.
The largest of all, a sixteen-fold gain, came from finding simpler ways to represent the numbers computers use to make their calculations.
The New Math
The latest NVIDIA Hopper architecture with its Transformer Engine uses a dynamic mix of eight- and 16-bit floating point and integer math. It’s tailored to the needs of today’s generative AI models. Dally detailed both the performance gains and the energy savings the new math delivers.
Separately, his team helped achieve a 12.5x leap by crafting advanced instructions that tell the GPU how to organize its work. These complex commands help execute more work with less energy.
As a result, computers can be “as efficient as dedicated accelerators, but retain all the programmability of GPUs,” he said.
In addition, the NVIDIA Ampere architecture added structural sparsity, an innovative way to simplify the weights in AI models without compromising the model’s accuracy. The technique brought another 2x performance increase and promises future advances, too, he said.
Dally described how NVLink interconnects between GPUs in a system and NVIDIA networking among systems compound the 1,000x gains in single GPU performance.
No Free Lunch
Though NVIDIA migrated GPUs from 28nm to 5nm semiconductor nodes over the decade, that technology only accounted for 2.5x of the total gains, Dally noted.
That’s a huge change from computer design a generation ago under Moore’s law, an observation that performance should double every two years as chips become ever smaller and faster.
Those gains were described in part by Denard scaling, essentially a physics formula defined in a 1974 paper co-authored by IBM scientist Robert Denard. Unfortunately, the physics of shrinking hit natural limits such as the amount of heat the ever smaller and faster devices could tolerate.
An Upbeat Outlook
Dally expressed confidence that Huang’s law will continue despite diminishing gains from Moore’s law.
For example, he outlined several opportunities for future advances in further simplifying how numbers are represented, creating more sparsity in AI models and designing better memory and communications circuits.
Because each new chip and system generation demands new innovations, “it’s a fun time to be a computer engineer,” he said.
Dally believes the new dynamic in computer design is giving NVIDIA’s engineers the three opportunities they desire most: to be part of a winning team, to work with smart people and to work on designs that have impact.
Explore generative AI sessions and experiences at NVIDIA GTC, the global conference on AI and accelerated computing, running March 18-21 in San Jose, Calif., and online.
]]>Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows.
Principal NVIDIA artist and 3D expert Michael Johnson creates highly detailed art that’s both technically impressive and emotionally resonant. It’s evident in his latest piece, Father-Son Collaboration, which draws on inspiration from the vivid imagination of his son and is highlighted this week In the NVIDIA Studio.
“I love how art can bring joy and great memories to others — great work makes me feel special to be a human and an artist,” said Johnson. “Art can flip people’s perspectives and make them feel something completely different.”
Learn about OpenUSD and Omniverse at SIGGRAPH, which will feature hands-on labs, special events and demo booths, and don’t miss NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address on Tuesday, Aug. 8, at 8 a.m. PT.
“The story behind this piece is that I simply wanted to inspire my son and teach him how things can be perceived — how people can be inspired by others’ art,” said Johnson, who could tell that his son — a doodler himself — often considered his own artwork not good enough.
“I wanted to show him what I saw in his art and how it inspired me,” Johnson said.
Through this project, Johnson also aimed to demonstrate the NVIDIA Studio-powered workflows of art studios and concept artists across the world.
NVIDIA RTX GPU technology plays a pivotal role in accelerating Johnson’s creativity. “As an artist, I care about quick feedback and stability,” he said. “My NVIDIA A6000 RTX graphics card speeds up the rendering process so I can quickly iterate.”
For Father-Son Collaboration, Johnson first opened Autodesk Maya to model the creature’s basic 3D shapes. His GPU-accelerated viewport enabled fast, interactive 3D modeling.
Next, he imported models into ZBrush for further sculpting, freestyling and details. “After I had my final sculpt down, I took the model into Rizom-Lab IV software to lay out the UVs,” Johnson said. UV mapping is the process of projecting a 3D model’s surface to a 2D image for texture mapping. It makes the model easier to texture and shade later in the creative workflow.
Johnson then used Adobe Substance 3D Painter to apply standard and custom textures and shaders on the character.
“Substance 3D Painter is really great because it displays the final look of the textures without bringing it into an external renderer,” said Johnson.
His GPU unlocked RTX-accelerated light and ambient occlusion baking, optimizing assets in mere seconds.
With the textures complete, Johnson imported his models back into Autodesk Maya for hair, grooming, lighting and rendering. For the hair and fur, the artist used XGen, Autodesk Maya’s built-in instancing tool. Autodesk Maya also offers third-party support of GPU-accelerated renderers such as Chaos V-Ray, OTOY OctaneRender and Maxon Redshift.
“Redshift is great — and having a great GPU makes renders really quick,” Johnson added. Redshift’s RTX-accelerated final-frame rendering with AI-powered OptiX denoising exported files with plenty of time to spare.
Johnson put the final touches on Father-Son Collaboration in Adobe Photoshop. With access to over 30 GPU-accelerated features, such as blur gallery, object selection, perspective warp and more, he applied the background and added minor touch-ups to complete the piece.
The joy, awe and wonderment he’d hoped to invoke in his son came to fruition when Johnson finally shared the piece.
“Art is one of the rare things in life that really has no end goal — as it’s really about the process, rather than the result,” Johnson said. “Every day, you learn something new, grow and see things in different ways.”
Check out Johnson’s portfolio on Instagram.
Follow NVIDIA Studio on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Access tutorials on the Studio YouTube channel and get updates directly in your inbox by subscribing to the Studio newsletter.
]]>“You are running for food, or you are running from becoming food. And often times, you can’t tell which. Either way, run.”
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang today urged graduates of National Taiwan University to run hard to seize the unprecedented opportunities that AI will present, but embrace the inevitable failures along the way.
Whatever you pursue, he told the 10,000 graduates of the island’s premier university, do it with passion and conviction — and stay humble enough to learn the hard lessons that await.
“Whatever it is, run after it like we did. Run. Don’t walk,” Huang said, having swapped his signature black leather jacket for a black graduation robe, with the school’s plum-blossom emblem highlighting a royal blue, white and aqua collar.
“Remember, either you are running for food; or you are running from becoming food. And often times, you can’t tell which. Either way, run.”
Huang, who moved from Taiwan when he was young, recognized his parents in the audience, and shared three stories of initial failures and retreat. He called them instrumental in helping forge NVIDIA’s character during its three-decade journey from a three-person gaming-graphics startup to a global AI leader worth nearly a trillion dollars.
“I was … successful — until I started NVIDIA,” he said. “At NVIDIA, I experienced failures — great big ones. All humiliating and embarrassing. Many nearly doomed us.”
The first involved a key early contract the company won to help Sega build a gaming console. Rapid changes in the industry forced NVIDIA to give up the contract in a near-death brush with bankruptcy, which Sega’s leadership helped avert.
“Confronting our mistake and, with humility, asking for help saved NVIDIA,” he said.
The second was the decision in 2007 to put CUDA into all the company’s GPUs, enabling them to crunch data in addition to handling 3D graphics. It was an expensive, long-term investment that drew much criticism didn’t pay off for years until the chips started being used for machine learning.
“Our market cap hovered just above a billion dollars,” he recalled. “We suffered many years of poor performance. Our shareholders were skeptical of CUDA and preferred we improve profitability.”
The third was the decision in 2010 to charge into the promising mobile-phone market as graphics-rich capabilities were coming into reach. The market quickly commoditized, though, and NVIDIA retreated just as quickly, taking initial heat but opening the door to investing in promising new markets — robotics and self-driving cars.
“Our strategic retreat paid off,” he said. “By leaving the phone market, we opened our minds to invent a new one.”
Huang told grads that of the parallels in terms of boundless promise between the world he entered upon graduating four decades ago, on the cusp of the PC revolution, and the brave new age of AI they are entering today.
“For your journey, take along some of my learnings,” he said. Admit mistakes and ask for help; endure pain and suffering to realize your dreams; and make sacrifices to dedicate yourself to a life of purpose.
]]>From scaling mountains in the annual California Death Ride bike challenge to creating a low-cost, open-source ventilator in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally is no stranger to accomplishing near-impossible feats.
On Friday, he achieved another rare milestone: induction into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council’s Hall of Fame.
The aim of the council —- a coalition of engineering societies, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, SAE International and the Association for Computing Machinery — is to promote engineering programs and enhance society through science.
Previous Hall of Fame inductees include industry luminaries such as Intel founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, former president of Stanford University and MIPS founder John Hennessy, and Google distinguished engineer and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley David Patterson.
Recognizing ‘an Industry Leader’
In accepting the distinction, Dally said, “I am honored to be inducted into the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame. The work for which I am being recognized is part of a large team effort. Many faculty and students participated in the stream processing research at Stanford, and a very large team at NVIDIA was involved in translating this research into GPU computing. It is a really exciting time to be a computer engineer.
“The future is bright with a lot more demanding applications waiting to be accelerated using the principles of stream processing and accelerated computing,” he said.
His induction kicked off with a video featuring colleagues and friends, spanning his career across Caltech, MIT, Stanford and NVIDIA.
In the video, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang describes Dally as “an extraordinary scientist, engineer, leader and amazing person.”
Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, commended Dally’s journey “from an academic scholar and a world-class researcher to an industry leader” who is spearheading one of the “biggest digital revolutions of our time in terms of AI — both software and hardware.”
Following the tribute video, Fred Barez, chair of the Hall of Fame committee and professor of mechanical engineering at San Jose State University, took the stage and said: “This year’s inductee has made significant contributions, not just to his profession, but to Silicon Valley and beyond.”
Underpinning the GPU Revolution
As the leader of NVIDIA Research for nearly 15 years, Dally has built a team of more than 300 scientists around the globe, with groups covering a wide range of topics, including AI, graphics, simulation, computer vision, self-driving cars and robotics.
Prior to NVIDIA, Dally advanced the state of the art in engineering at some of the world’s top academic institutions. His development of stream processing at Stanford led directly to GPU computing, and his contributions are responsible for much of the technology used today in high-performance computing networks.
]]>Those looking to join the ranks of AI trailblazers or chart a new course in their careers need look no further.
At NVIDIA’s latest GTC conference, industry leaders in a panel called “5 Paths to a Career in AI” shared tips and insights on how to make a mark in this rapidly evolving field.
Representing diverse sectors such as healthcare, automotive, augmented and virtual reality, climate and energy, and manufacturing, these experts offered valuable advice for all seeking to build a career in AI.
Here are five key takeaways from the discussion:
- Be curious and constantly learn: “I think in order to break into this field, you’ve got to be curious. It’s so important to always be learning [and] always be asking questions,” emphasized Chelsea Sumner, healthcare AI startups lead for North and Latin America at NVIDIA. “If we’re not asking questions, and we’re not learning, we’re not growing.”
- Tell your story effectively to different audiences: “Your ability to tell your story to a variety of different audiences is essential,” noted Justin Taylor, vice president of AI at Lockheed Martin. “So for them to understand what you’re doing [with AI], how you’re doing it, why you’re doing it is essential.”
- Embrace challenges and be resilient: “When you have all of these different experiences, you understand that it’s not always going to be perfect,” advised Laura Leal-Taixé, professor at the Technical University of Munich and principal scientist at Argo AI. “And when things aren’t always perfect, you’re able to have competence because [you know that you] did that really hard thing and was able to get through it.”
- Understand the purpose behind your work: “Understand the baseline, how do you collect the data baseline — understand the physical, the bottom line. What’s the purpose, what do you want to do?” advised Jay Lee, Ohio eminent scholar of the University of Cincinnati and board member of Foxconn.
- Collaborate and seek support from others: “It’s so important for resiliency to find people across different domains and really tap into that,” said Carrie Gotch, creator and content strategy for 3D/AR at Adobe. “No one does it alone, right? You’re always part of a system, part of a team of people.”
The panelists stressed the importance of staying up to date and curious, gaining practical experience, collaborating with others and taking risks when building a career in AI.
Get inspired by the next panel of true innovators developing AI solutions that change the world in healthcare, climate, generative AI, social impact and more. Join our NVIDIA GTC special event, Change the World with a Career in AI on March 22nd.
It could be the first step toward a rewarding AI career that takes you into 2023 and beyond.
]]>In a moment of pure serendipity, Lah Yileh Lee and Xinting Lee, a pair of talented singers who often stream their performances online, found themselves performing in a public square in Taipei when NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang happened upon them.
Huang couldn’t resist joining in, cheering on their serenade as they recorded Lady Gaga’s “Always Remember Us This Way.”
The resulting video quickly went viral, as did a follow-up video from the pair, who sang Lady Gaga’s “Hold My Hand,” the song Huang originally requested.
Toy Jensen Created Using NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine
Now, with the help of his AI-driven avatar, Toy Jensen, Huang has come up with a playful holiday-themed response.
NVIDIA’s creative team quickly developed a holiday performance by TJ, a tech demo showcasing core technologies that are part of the NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine, or ACE, platform.
Omniverse ACE is a collection of cloud-native AI microservices and workflows for developers to easily build, customize and deploy engaging and interactive avatars.
Unlike current avatar development, which requires expertise, specialized equipment, and manually intensive workflows, Omniverse ACE is built on top of the Omniverse platform and NVIDIA’s Unified Compute Framework, or UCF, which makes it possible to quickly create and configure AI pipelines with minimal coding.
“It’s a really amazing technology, and the fact that we can do this is phenomenal,” said Cyrus Hogg, an NVIDIA technical program manager.
To make it happen, NVIDIA’s team used a recently developed voice conversion model to extract the voice of a professional singer from a sample provided by them and turn it into TJ’s voice – originally developed by training on hours of real world recordings. They used the musical notes from that sample and applied them to the digital voice of TJ to make the avatar sing the same notes and with the same rhythm as the original singer.
NVIDIA Omniverse Generative AI – Audio2Face, Audio2Gesture Enable Realistic Facial Expressions, Body Movements
Then the team used NVIDIA Omniverse ACE along with Omniverse Audio2Face and Audio2Gesture technologies to generate realistic facial expressions and body movements for the animated performance based on TJ’s audio alone.
While the team behind Omniverse ACE technologies spent years developing and fine-tuning the technology showcased in the performance, turning the music track they created into a polished video took just hours.
Toy Jensen Delights Fans With ‘Jingle Bells’ Performance
That gave them plenty of time to ensure an amazing performance.
They even collaborated with Jochem van der Saag, a composer and producer who has worked with Michael Bublé and David Foster, to create the perfect backing track for TJ to sing along to.
“We have van der Saag composing the song, and he’s gonna also orchestrate it for us,” said Hogg. “So that’s a really great addition to the team. And we’re really excited to have him on board.”
ACE Could Revolutionize Virtual Experiences
The result is the perfect showcase for NVIDIA Omniverse ACE and the applications it could have in various industries — for virtual events, online education and customer service, as well as in creating personalized avatars for video games, social media and virtual reality experiences. NVIDIA Omniverse ACE will be available soon to early-access partners.
]]>As a civil engineer, Scott Ashford used explosives to make the ground under Japan’s Sendai airport safer in an earthquake. Now, as the dean of the engineering college at Oregon State University, he’s at ground zero of another seismic event.
In its biggest fundraising celebration in nearly a decade, Oregon State announced plans today for a $200 million center where faculty and students can plug into resources that will include one of the world’s fastest university supercomputers.
The 150,000-square-foot center, due to open in 2025, will accelerate work at Oregon State’s top-ranked programs in agriculture, computer sciences, climate science, forestry, oceanography, robotics, water resources, materials sciences and more with the help of AI.
A Beacon in AI, Robotics
In honor of a $50 million gift to the OSU Foundation from NVIDIA’s founder and CEO and his wife — who earned their engineering degrees at OSU and met in one of its labs — it will be named the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex (CIC).
“The CIC and new supercomputer will help Oregon State be recognized as one of the world’s leading universities for AI, robotics and simulation,” said Ashford, whose engineering college includes more than 10,000 of OSU’s 35,000 students.
“We discovered our love for computer science and engineering at OSU,” said Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang. “We hope this gift will help inspire future generations of students also to fall in love with technology and its capacity to change the world.
“AI is the most transformative technology of our time,” they added. “To harness this force, engineering students need access to a supercomputer, a time machine, to accelerate their research. This new AI supercomputer will enable OSU students and researchers to make very important advances in climate science, oceanography, materials science, robotics and other fields.”
A Hub for Students
With an extended-reality theater, robotics and drone playground and a do-it-yourself maker space, the new complex is expected to attract students from across the university. “It has the potential to transform not only the college of engineering, but the entire university, and have a positive economic and environmental impact on the state and the nation,” Ashford said.
The three-story facility will include a clean room, as well as labs for materials scientists, environmental researchers and more.
Ashford expects that over the next decade the center will attract top researchers, as well as research projects potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Our donors and university leaders are excited about investing in a collaborative, transdisciplinary approach to problem solving and discovery — it will revitalize our engineering triangle and be an amazing place to study and conduct research,” he said.
A Forest of Opportunities
He gave several examples of the center’s potential. Among them:
- Environmental and electronics researchers may collaborate to design and deploy sensors and use AI to analyze their data, finding where in the ocean or forest hard-to-track endangered species are breeding so their habitats can be protected.
- Students can use augmented reality to train in simulated clean rooms on techniques for making leading-edge chips. Federal and Oregon state officials aim to expand workforce development for the U.S. semiconductor industry, Ashford said.
- Robotics researchers could create lifelike simulations of their drones and robots to accelerate training and testing. (Cassie, a biped robot designed at OSU, just made Guinness World Records for the fastest 100-meter dash by a bot.)
- Students at OSU and its sister college in Germany, DHBW-Ravensburg, could use NVIDIA Omniverse — a platform for building and operating metaverse applications and connecting their 3D pipelines — to enhance design of their award-winning, autonomous, electric race cars.
Building AI Models, Digital Twins
Such efforts will be accelerated with NVIDIA AI and Omniverse, software that can expand the building’s physical labs with simulations and digital twins so every student can have a virtual workbench.
OSU will get state-of-the-art NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD and OVX SuperPOD clusters once the complex’s data center is ready. With an eye on energy efficiency, water that cooled computer racks will then help heat more than 500,000 square feet of campus buildings.
The SuperPOD will likely include a mix of about 60 DGX and OVX systems — powered by next-generation CPUs, GPUs and networking — creating a system powerful enough to train the largest AI models and perform complex digital twin simulations. Ashford notes OSU won a project working with the U.S. Department of Energy because its existing computer center has a handful of DGX systems.
Advancing Diversity, Inclusion
At the Oct. 14 OSU Foundation event announcing the naming of the new complex, Oregon State officials thanked donors and kicked off a university-wide fundraising campaign. OSU has requested support from the state of Oregon for construction of the building and seeks additional philanthropic investments to expand its research and support its hiring and diversity goals.
OSU’s president, Jayathi Murthy, said the complex provides an opportunity to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the university’s STEM education and research. OSU’s engineering college is already among the top-ranked U.S. schools for tenured or tenure-track engineering faculty who are women.
AI Universities Sprout
Oregon State also is among a small but growing set of universities accelerating their journeys in AI and high performance computing.
A recent whitepaper described efforts at University of Florida to spread AI across its curriculum as part of a partnership with NVIDIA that enabled it to install HiPerGator, a DGX SuperPOD based on NVIDIA DGX A100 systems with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs.
Following Florida’s example, Southern Methodist University announced last fall its plans to make the Dallas area a hub of AI development around its new DGX SuperPOD. And three years ago, the Milwaukee School of Engineering inaugurated Rosie, a supercomputer used to educate undergrads in the application of AI to solve real-world problems, with plans for a graduate certification program in the offing.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest in the idea of AI universities from Asia, Europe and across the U.S.,” said Cheryl Martin, who leads NVIDIA’s efforts in higher education research.
For over a decade, NVIDIA has invested in social causes and communities in India as part of our commitment to corporate social responsibility.
Bolstering those efforts, we’re unveiling this year’s investments in five projects that have been selected by the NVIDIA Foundation team, focused on the areas of environmental conservation, ecological restoration, social innovation and job creation.
The projects we’re supporting include:
Energy Harvest Charitable Trust
This project aims to reduce air pollution by preventing open-field burning and instead encouraging sustainable energy alternatives such as turning waste biomass into green fertilizer. The trust also promotes village-level entrepreneurship by integrating local farmers into the paddy straw value chain and supporting straw-based constructions in Rajpura, Punjab.
Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society
This initiative will restore the ecological conditions of 12.3 acres of mangroves and train 1,125 community members on disaster response to build community resilience in Sunderbans, West Bengal. The nonprofit partner will focus on bolstering local infrastructure and maintaining sanitation — all with an ecosystem-based approach.
Foundation for Ecological Security
We’re building on our existing partnership with the foundation by funding the construction of irrigation and water-harvesting structures in the Koraput district of Odisha. Last year’s work benefited 2,500 tribal households by promoting natural farming, which ensured food availability and increased vegetative cover for nearly 500 acres of land.
Following a previous investment, our partnership with the Naandi Foundation will continue to build resilient farming communities in the Araku region of Andhra Pradesh. The project will train 3,000 farmers in Naandi’s Farmer Field Schools to earn sustained income by cultivating coffee and pepper plants using organic regenerative practices. Previous efforts trained over 3,000 farmers across 115 villages and resulted in the production and distribution of nearly 34,000 kilograms of coffee fruit.
This nonprofit strives for environmental conservation and women’s economic empowerment. Our funding will go toward conserving and restoring endangered medicinal and aromatic plants by training 600 Himalayan villagers — especially women — in sustainable cultivation, harvest and plant monitoring in Uttarakhand.
NVIDIA’s corporate social responsibility initiatives span the globe. In the last fiscal year, our joint efforts with employees led to a contribution of over $22.3 million to 5,700 nonprofits in 50+ countries around the world.
Read more about previous projects we’ve funded in India and corporate social responsibility at NVIDIA.
]]>Asked about the future of design, Donald Greenberg holds up a model of a human aorta.
“After my son became an intravascular heart surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, he hired one of my students to use CAT scans and create digital 3D models of an aortic aneurysm,” said the computer graphics pioneer in a video interview from his office at Cornell University.
The models enabled custom stents that fit so well patients could leave the hospital soon after they’re inserted. It’s one example Greenberg gives of how computer graphics are becoming part of every human enterprise.
A Whole New Chapter
Expanding the frontier, he’s creating new tools for an architecture design course based on today’s capabilities for building realistic 3D worlds and digital twins. It will define a holistic process so everyone from engineers to city planners can participate in a design.
The courseware is still at the concept stage, but his passion for it is palpable. “This is my next big project, and I’m very excited about it,” said the computer graphics professor of the work, which is sponsored by NVIDIA.
“NVIDIA is superb at the hardware and the software algorithms, and for a long time its biggest advantage is in how it fits them together,” he said.
Greenberg imagines a design process open enough to include urban planners concerned with affordable housing, environmental activists mindful of sustainable living and neighbors who want to know the impact a new structure might have on their access to sunlight.
“I want to put people from different disciplines in the same foxhole so they can see things from different points of view at the same time,” said Greenberg, whose courses have spanned Cornell’s architecture, art, computer science, engineering and business departments.
Teaching With Omniverse
A multidisciplinary approach has fueled Greenberg’s work since 1968, when he started teaching at both Cornell’s colleges of engineering and architecture. And he’s always been rooted in the latest technology.
Today, that means inspiring designers and construction experts to enter the virtual worlds built with photorealistic graphics, simulations and AI in NVIDIA Omniverse.
“Omniverse expands, to multiple domains, the work done with Universal Scene Description, developed by some of the brightest graphics people at places like Pixar — it’s a superb environment for modern collaboration,” he said.
It’s a capability that couldn’t have existed without the million-X advances in computing Greenberg has witnessed in his 54-year career.
He recalls his excitement in 1979 when he bought a VAX-11/780 minicomputer, his first system capable of a million instructions per second. In one of his many SIGGRAPH talks, he said designers would someday have personal workstations capable of 100 MIPS.
Seeing Million-X Advances
The prediction proved almost embarrassingly conservative.
“Now I have a machine that’s 1012 times more powerful than my first computer — I feel like a surfer riding a tidal wave, and that’s one reason I’m still teaching,” he said.
It’s a long way from the system at General Electric’s Visual Simulation Laboratory in Syracuse, New York, where in the late 1960s he programmed on punch cards to help create one of the first videos generated solely with computer graphics. The 18-minute animation wowed audiences and took him and 14 of his architecture students two years to create.
NASA used the same GE system to train astronauts how to dock the Apollo module with the lunar lander. And the space agency was one of the early adopters of digital twins, he notes, a fact that saved the lives of the Apollo 13 crew after a system malfunction two days into their trip to the moon.
From Sketches to Digital Twins
For Greenberg, it all comes down to the power of computer graphics.
“I love to draw, 99% of intellectual intake comes through our eyes and my recent projects are about how to go from a sketch or idea to a digital twin,” he said.
Among his few regrets, he said he’ll miss attending SIGGRAPH in person this year.
“It became an academic home for my closest friends and collaborators, a community of mavericks and the only place I found creative people with both huge imaginations and great technical skills, but it’s hard to travel at my age,” said the 88-year-old, whose pioneering continues in front of his computer screen.
“I have a whole bunch of stuff I’m working on that I call techniques in search of a problem, like trying to model how the retina sees an image — I’m just getting started on that one,” he said.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————
Learn More About Omniverse at SIGGRAPH
Anyone can get started working on digital twins with Omniverse by taking a free, self-paced online course at the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute. And individuals can download Omniverse free.
Educators can request early access to the “Graphics & Omniverse” teaching kit. SIGGRAPH attendees can join a session on “The Metaverse for International Educators” or one of four hands-on training labs on Omniverse.
To learn more, watch NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang and others in a special address at SIGGRAPH on-demand.
]]>A record number of interns calls for a record-sized celebration.
In our largest contingent ever, over 1,650 interns from 350+ schools started with NVIDIA worldwide over the past year.
Amidst busy work days tackling real-world projects across engineering, automation, robotics and more, the group’s also finishing up a three-day celebration, culminating today with National Intern Day. Events ranged from tech demos to virtual meditation and yoga classes to an exclusive Q&A with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
The three stories below highlight the meaningful work of our interns — who are roughly half undergrads, half grad students — and the connections they’ve been forging.
Bailey Tinkers His Way Into Computer Engineering
Ever since he started tinkering with PC parts at age 12, Darryl Bailey — a computer engineering student at Georgia Tech — knew he wanted to work with computers.
He’s doing just that this summer as an ASIC verification intern on the Compute Express Link team, which ensures bug-free pre-silicon design across multiple GPUs. So far, he’s worked on a dashboard that will simplify the workflows of design verification engineers.
“This project specifically has a high impact because the script is going to be used by all design verification engineers at NVIDIA,” he said. “It’s a really cool feeling to have my code out there in action.”
Bailey hasn’t just been gaining technical skills here. He’s also honed his work style and learned how to use soft skills to most effectively wield the hard skills he’s acquired at school.
“The most important thing I’ve gotten out of this internship is that we’re all just one big team,” he said. “I realized that as much as I want to learn and dive into everything related to computers, it’s also okay to just focus on one thing, because we’re all working together towards the final goal.”
Kulkarni Pioneers a Path in Engineering
This summer, Seema Kulkarni, an electrical and computer engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, joined NVIDIA as a software R&D intern working on NVIDIA Omniverse, a virtual world simulation and collaboration platform for 3D workflows.
Kulkarni comes from a background with limited early exposure to careers in tech. Her academic journey initially suggested a future in finance and marketing. But, wanting to make a more tangible impact, she switched over to engineering.
“I really loved sitting in on the Women’s Leadership Panel hosted by the University Recruiting team because it felt inspiring to know that even as a woman, you can stay in technical fields for a long time and love it,” she said. “Seeing these female leaders drive innovation here at NVIDIA affirmed that no matter where you’re at, there’s always room to flourish.”
So far, Kulkarni has been working on projects like building asset validators that will simplify user interface for NVIDIA Omniverse users and debugging Universal Scene Description code to resolve critical issues. It’s taught her to be a better software engineer because it’s challenged her to think in the way that the engineers that came before her did.
Kim Kicks Off Her Second Round in Technical Writing
Writing may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about an internship at NVIDIA.
But as JJ Kim, a marketing major from Boston University, points out, communication is key in any business, even in tech.
This summer, Kim’s returning for her second stint on the enterprise marketing team as a technical writing intern. She’s assisted with SIGGRAPH preparations and is churning out explainer blogs, which break down technical concepts in a digestible, approachable way.
“I always feel like I’m learning new things when I write these explainer blogs because they do such a good job of helping someone like me — who has limited technical knowledge — understand what it is that NVIDIA technology does and the impact that it’s making,” she said.
Kim says what’s brought her back for a second internship is NVIDIA’s inclusive, welcoming culture.
“Everyone is so willing to help, which makes work feel like such a safe environment,” she said. “I’m not afraid to try new things out or ask questions because I have such an amazing team of experienced people to work with.”
Read more about NVIDIA’s internship program. Applications are accepted year-round.
]]>NVIDIA’s latest corporate responsibility report shares our efforts in empowering employees and putting to work our technologies for the benefit of humanity.
Amid ongoing global economic concerns and pandemic challenges, this year’s report highlights our ability to attract and retain talent that come here to do their life’s work while tackling some of the world’s greatest technology and societal challenges.
Taking Care of Our People
NVIDIA scored the highest grade for workplaces, ranking No. 1 on Glassdoor’s Best Places to work list for large U.S. companies. Some 95% of employees indicated they’d recommend NVIDIA to a friend.
We make the health of our employees and their families a top priority. Our family leave policy allows U.S. employees 12 weeks of fully paid leave to care for family members. And we’ve selected eight days each year in which we shut down all but essential operations globally, so employees can unwind without having to return to a full inbox.
We’ve recently added surrogacy benefits and fertility education resources to our award-winning list of family-forming benefits, which include adoption support and a generous parental leave program of up to 22 weeks of fully paid leave.
And we worked with our LGBTQ+ colleagues to expand gender affirmation resources and support.
Supporting Communities
Last year we established the Ignite program to prepare students from underrepresented communities for NVIDIA summer internships. Sixty-five percent of these students are returning for our internship program, and we saw a 100% increase in applications for this summer’s Ignite program.
We supported professional organizations, including Black Women in AI, Women in Data and Women-ai, to increase access to AI education and technology.
We launched NVIDIA Emerging Chapters, a new program that enables developers in emerging regions to build and scale their AI, data science and graphics expertise through technology access, educational resources and co-marketing opportunities.
We announced a three-year partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania to expand access to AI and robotics to students in communities traditionally underrepresented in tech. Core to this is an open-source curriculum that will make it easy for Boys & Girls Clubs nationwide to deliver AI education to their students.
Our employees remained committed to donating resources to those in need, with nearly 40% of them participating in the NVIDIA Foundation’s Inspire 365 efforts during fiscal year 2022. That brought the unique participation rate since the initiative’s start to 68%.
Despite in-person volunteering remaining paused due to COVID, NVIDIANs still logged more than 16,500 volunteer hours through individual and virtual efforts, up more than 76% from the previous fiscal year.
NVIDIANs also joined the company in contributing more than $22 million to charitable causes in the last fiscal year. And during the Ukraine crisis, employees and NVIDIA have donated more than $4.6 million to date for humanitarian relief.
Developing Climate Solutions
NVIDIA GPUs are enabling progress in responding to the crisis of climate change. With recent advances in AI, modeling of weather forecasting can now be done 4-5 magnitudes faster than with traditional computing methods.
We plan to build Earth-2, an AI supercomputer that will create a digital twin of the Earth, enabling scientists to do ultra-high-resolution climate modeling and put tools into the hands of cities and nations to simulate the impact of mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Digital twins are also being used to predict costly maintenance at power plants and model new energy sources like fusion reactor design.
NVIDIA scientists along with leading institutions are using AI to model the most efficient way to capture greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and lock them away underground.
Startups from the NVIDIA Inception program are jumping into the climate challenge as well. In Kenya, a company is using AI to monitor the health of bee colonies. And a German startup is monitoring the ocean floor to help scientists understand how natural carbon sinks can be better utilized.
Building Energy-Efficient Technologies
These solutions are not only bringing innovation to the climate challenge, but are built on a foundation of energy-efficient technology.
We aim to make every new generation of our GPUs faster and more energy efficient than its predecessor. As AI models and HPC applications increase exponentially in size, moving to new-generation GPUs will help our customers complete their work with lower energy consumption and get results more quickly.
NVIDIA GPUs are typically 20x more energy efficient for certain AI and HPC workloads than CPUs. If we switched accelerated computing workloads from CPU-only servers worldwide to GPU-accelerated systems, we estimate the world could save nearly 12 trillion watt-hours of energy a year, equivalent to the electricity requirements of nearly 1.7 million U.S. homes.
Leaning Into Trustworthy AI
We’re committed to the advancement of trustworthy AI, recognizing that technology can have a profound impact on people and the world. We’ve set priorities that are rooted in fostering positive change and enabling trust and transparency in AI development.
We’re developing practices and methodologies enabling construction of AI products that are trustworthy by design, including datasets, machine learning tools and processes, AI model development, and software development and testing.
Running a Mission-Driven Company
As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang mentions in the opening letter of our corporate responsibility report, creating a place where people can do impactful work means building a culture strong enough to be willing to take on the most pressing problems.
The impacts of accelerated computing, which we have driven over the last two decades, are already being felt in areas as wide ranging as self-driving cars, healthcare and, increasingly, in climate change. We’re proud to have built this organization with more than 20,000 of the brightest minds and look forward to what they choose to tackle next.
]]>