Artificial intelligence agents dominated the conversation at Nvidia Corp.’s GTC 2025 event, and much of the talk was about how they’ll benefit from the accelerated performance of the company’s latest graphics processing units.

The company lifted the veil on Nvidia Blackwell Ultra, the latest evolution of its newest GPU platform, saying it’s designed to bear the brunt of next-generation AI reasoning workloads, launching them alongside its first-ever Blackwell-powered desktop computers for AI developers.

Blackwell Ultra provides a significant upgrade to the original Blackwell architecture that was announced one year earlier during the previous edition of GTC, improving performance and scale for both AI training and inference workloads and paving the way for so-called AI agents to rule the world.

AI agents are the next big thing in AI systems, promising to perform multiple kinds of tasks autonomously for users without any more effort than a simple prompt telling it what it’s supposed to do. If they live up to their billing, they could well prove to be transformational in numerous different industries. But for that to happen, they need a reliable, blazing-fast infrastructure to support them.

That’s where Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra comes in. It bundles the Nvidia GB300 NVL72 rack-scale solution that packs a whopping 72 of the latest Blackwell GPUs with 36 Arm Neoverse-based Nvidia Grace central processing units, running them together as if they were a single, super-high-performance chip.

It’s combined with the Nvidia HGX B300 NVL16 baseboard system in order to provide 1.5 times better AI performance than last year’s GB200 NVL72 rack-scale set up. What’s more, it boosts the “revenue opportunity” for so-called AI factories by up to 50 times when compared with those powered by older Hopper architecture-based GPUs.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang justified the need for ever more compute power, saying that AI technology has made a gigantic leap in the last couple of years.

“Reasoning and agentic AI demand orders of magnitude more computing performance,” he said. “We designed Blackwell Ultra for this moment. It’s a single versatile platform that can easily and efficiently do pretraining, post-training and reasoning inference.”

Nvidia said the GB300 NVL72 system will be made available through the Nvidia DGX Cloud platform, which is a managed AI infrastructure service that runs on leading cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. In addition, companies will be able to install it on-premises when they purchase an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD hardware system to build their own turnkey AI factory.

Other components of the Blackwell Ultra architecture include Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet and Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking systems, which provide up to 800 gigabytes per second of data throughput for each of the 72 GPUs in the system. Also onboard is a cluster of Nvidia’s BlueField-3 data processing units, which are used to process nonessential, related computing tasks to free up the GPUs to focus solely on training and inference.

Besides making its own on-premises and cloud-based systems, Nvidia is also offering the Blackwell Ultra architecture to key partners in the AI server space. It promised that the likes of Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Supermicro Computer Inc. are all set to start shipping a number of server systems based on the new architecture. Others, including AsusTek Computer Inc., Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd., Pegatron Corp. and Inventec Corp. will also sell Blackwell Ultra-based servers later this year.

Finally, the new platform will also be offered on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as GPU cloud pure plays such as CoreWeave and Crusoe.

Nvidia said the Blackwell Ultra architecture is set to deliver “breakthrough performance” for the most complex AI workloads envisaged, enabling AI agents that will be able to reason, plan and take actions to achieve those plans. In addition, Nvidia has grand ideas around so-called “physical AI,” powering a new generation of more intelligent and capable autonomous robots, cars and drones at much bigger scales than previously thought possible.

Blackwell GPUs land on desktops

The age of agentic AI isn’t just about AI factories living in enormous data centers, though. For agentic AI to happen, there’s a need for much more flexibility around where those AI agents can live and run experiments, which explains why Nvidia is also launching its first “personal AI supercomputers” powered by the Blackwell GPUs.

These new AI supercomputers come in two forms – DGX Spark and DGX Station – and they look much like any regular laptop or desktop computer, except they pack a hugely powerful Blackwell GPU to do all sorts of impressive agentic AI number crunching in any location.

The new machines, which were developed as part of Nvidia’s Project DIGITS, are meant for AI developers, researchers and data scientists who need to prototype, fine-tune and experiment with large language models running locally, instead of relying on cloud-based infrastructure.

Nvidia said the DGX Spark and DGX Station systems will be built in various form factors by the likes of Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo. They’ll feature a single Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which is a new version of the Blackwell GPU that has been optimized for integration with desktops.

Those chips are combined with 5th-generation tensor cores and FP4 support, making them able to process up to 1,000 trillion operations per second of AI compute. In other words, they’ll be able to run the most powerful new AI reasoning models locally, without breaking a sweat, Nvidia said. As a result, AI developers, researchers and even students will have local access to the same kind of AI horsepower normally only found in an enterprise data center — a stunning 1 petaflop of performance.

Nvidia said the GB10 Superchip relies on the company’s NVLink-C2C interconnect technology to connect it with the onboard CPUs, enabling data to flow between them up to five-times faster than 5th-generation PCIe. The chips also feature the Nvidia ConnectX-8 SuperNIC, which supports networking speeds of up to 800 Gb/s, enabling multiple AI supercomputers to be linked together for even larger local workloads.

Customers interested in buying the DGX Spark desktops can register their interest with Nvidia starting today, while the more powerful DGX Stations will become available from partners include Asus, Dell, HP and Supermicro later in the year.

Huang said AI has transformed every layer of the computing stack in the cloud and now it’s doing the same to the desktop PC. “With these new DGX personal AI computers, AI can now span from cloud services to desktop and edge applications,” he promised.

Images: Nvidia