Nvidia's A100 chip has 54 billion transistors.
Nvidia's A100 chip has 54 billion transistors.
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Nvidia unveils monstrous A100 AI chip with 54 billion transistors and 5 petaflops of performance

Nvidia unwrapped its Nvidia A100 artificial intelligence chip today, and CEO Jensen Huang called it the ultimate instrument for advancing AI. Huang said it can make supercomputing tasks — which are vital in the fight against COVID-19 — much more cost-efficient and powerful than today’s more expensive systems.

The chip has a monstrous 54 billion transistors (the on-off switches that are the building blocks of all things electronic), and it can execute 5 petaflops of performance, or about 20 times more than the previous-generation chip Volta. Huang made the announcement during his keynote at the Nvidia GTC event, which was digital this year.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.