How Nvidia’s Project Digits is about to democratize AI

Nvidia has announced at CES that it has created a desktop AI supercomputer called Project Digits. The ground-breaking machine is powered by its Blackwell microarchitecture, with its Grace CPU, which includes 20 low-power cores built with the Arm architecture, and able to run models of up to 200,000 million parameters. Nvidia says it aims to democratize AI, and at a starting price of $3,000, the computer is pretty much within the reach of any developer.

Around 1,000 times more powerful than a standard laptop, it’s about the size of the Mac Mini, and runs through with a standard power outlet, offering 1 petaflop of AI performance for prototyping, tuning and running large AI models. It has 128GB of memory and up to 4TB of storage, with the additional possibility of being able to combine two machines so as to run models of up to 405,000 million parameters, the current size, for example, of the most advanced model of Llama 3.1.

Nvidia has collaborated on the design with Taiwan’s MediaTek, the country’s leader in SoC designs based on the Arm architecture. The result is a machine that is highly energy-efficient for the performance it delivers. Basically, a personal supercomputer.

Essentially, what Nvidia has done is understand that there is demand for this type of machine, which will also boost demand for…