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Nvidia thinks AI can solve electrical grid problems caused by AI
Nvidia announced Thursday it’s partnering with EPRI, a power industry R&D organization, to use AI to solve problems facing the electrical grid. Perhaps ironically, the issues are largely caused by rising power demand from AI itself.
The Open Power AI Consortium, which includes a number of electrical utilities and tech companies, says it will use domain-specific AI models to devise new ways to tackle problems that the power industry is predicted to face in the coming years. The models will be open sourced and available to researchers across academia and industry.
The power industry is facing surging demand from data centers in the United States and elsewhere as AI ramps up the need for computing power. Electricity demand is expected to grow by 4% annually in the coming years, according to the International Energy Agency, nearly double over 2023 figures.
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Jensen Huang jokes about quantum computing stock crash he caused
In January 2025, Jensen Huang caused quantum computing stocks to crash after saying he believed quantum technology wouldn’t be very useful for the next 15 to 30 years.
Huang is now making amends by launching Nvidia’s first Quantum Day, where he’s moderating a panel with CEOs from some of the same quantum computing companies whose stocks plummeted.
In his opening speech, Huang said he never intended to trigger a crash with his remarks — in fact, he had no idea there were public quantum companies to begin with.
“When I made that comment, apparently the whole industry’s stock went down 60%,” he said. “And my first reaction was, ‘I didn’t know they were public!’ How could a quantum computer company be public? I discovered they were public companies — I’m very happy for them.”
Huang added that he thinks quantum computing holds “extraordinary” promise and noted that Nvidia was built on a similarly long timeline of decades of research and development. This week, Nvidia announced that it plans to build a new center in Boston to advance the development of quantum computing architectures and algorithms.
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Rivian CEO talks self-driving ambitions at GTC
Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe was interviewed by Nvidia’s VP of automotive Rishi Dhall during GTC on Wednesday. As one might expect, the bulk of the conversation centered around GPUs used for training and simulation and at the edge — in this case, a Rivian vehicle.
Toward the end of the talk, Dhall asked Scaringe a series of rapid-fire questions, including “Name one futuristic AI feature you wish Rivian … could develop tomorrow,” and “What’s one AI-powered feature that you wish Rivian and vehicles had right now, but isn’t possible yet?”
Scaringe’s answer in both cases? “Self-driving,” although Scaringe added that self-driving isn’t impossible and it’s just a matter of time until it’s achieved and that Rivian has spent considerable time laying the foundation to get there.
Last year, Rivian rolled out improvements that allowed the company to launch a hands-free version of its driver-assistance system for highway driving. The new hands-free feature handles the control steering, acceleration, and braking under certain conditions and locations, but it’s not considered a “Level 4” fully autonomous system.
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OpenAI’s Noam Brown thinks the AI ‘reasoning’ explosion could’ve happened a lot sooner
Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI, says certain forms of “reasoning” AI models could’ve arrived 20 years earlier had researchers “known [the right] approach” and algorithms.
“There were various reasons why this research direction was neglected,” Brown said during a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose on Wednesday. “I noticed over the course of my research that, OK, there’s something missing. Humans spend a lot of time thinking before they act in a tough situation. Maybe this would be very useful [in AI].”
Brown was referring to his work on game-playing AI at Carnegie Mellon University, including Pluribus, which defeated elite human professionals at poker. The AI Brown helped create was unique at the time in the sense that it “reasoned” through problems rather than attempting a more brute-force approach.
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Jensen Huang is ‘running low on blood sugar,’ pokes fun at reporters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is speaking at a Q&A for the press at GTC. And he’s pretty tired, the billionaire CEO admitted.
“I’m running low on blood sugar. I think I’ve had 100 calories of food over the past two days,” he said after asking for a Diet Coke, or some other caffeinated drink, onstage.
Huang also poked fun at some reporters for asking him overly long and technical questions, answering one with a blunt “Yes.”
He answered another question about base dies — a central semiconductor component — with a droll comment: “There’s no press release necessary for that optimization.”
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Nvidia reportedly buys an AI startup
In the midst of GTC, Nvidia has reportedly acquired synthetic data startup Gretel. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag was said to be nine figures, exceeding Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired.
San Diego-based Gretel was founded in 2019 by Alex Watson, Laszlo Bock, John Myers, and Ali Golshan, who also serves as the company’s CEO. The startup fine-tunes models, adds proprietary tech on top, and then packages these models together to sell them.
Nvidia’s acquisition is strategic — and timely. Tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are already using synthetic data to train flagship AI models as they exhaust sources of real-world data.
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The sweater robots are having a tough GTC
OpenAI-backed robotics startup 1X is here in San Jose showcasing its humanoid robot for the home, Neo Gamma.
The robot has been vacuuming and watering plants at the convention center where GTC is being held, albeit not autonomously. While 1X says that it’s building in-house AI models to power Neo Gamma’s movements and speech, the robot currently relies on humans to teleoperate it today.
Even with teleoperation, the robot isn’t perfect. Neo Gamma dropped a vacuum a few times on Wednesday. At one point, it started shaking, and then collapsed, only to be caught by 1X’s co-founder, Bernt Børnich. A 1X employee told us the robot was experiencing Wi-Fi issues in the crowded demo hall.
The sweater it’s wearing looks amazing, though.
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Nvidia backs stealth startup from former DeepMind robotics researcher
A senior research scientist at DeepMind who worked on robotics and AI has left Google to create his own robotics startup, called Generalist AI, and it has already obtained investment from Nvidia.
Former DeepMind employee Pete Florence was listed as co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI at a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose on Tuesday. The panel showcased portfolio companies of Nvidia’s VC arm, NVentures.
“We are largely still in stealth,” Florence told TechCrunch, explaining that the mission of his startup is “to make general-purpose robots a reality.”
Florence joins a string of other DeepMind alums who have founded their own companies, like autonomous coding startup Reflection AI, biotech startup Latent Labs, Mistral, and others.
Nvidia declined to comment. For more on Generalist AI and what it does, read TechCrunch’s article here.
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Sakana AI launches ‘perfect’ new benchmark based on Sudoku
Nvidia-backed Japanese unicorn Sakana AI says it has created a new benchmark to measure an AI model’s reasoning capabilities — and it’s based on the classic Japanese game of Sudoku.
The new benchmark, called Modern Sudoku, “really is perfect” for measuring reasoning capabilities, said Sakana’s CTO Llion Jones during a presentation at GTC.
Sudoku is a good way to measure reasoning for a number of reasons, including that it requires very creative long-term reasoning and that vision models aren’t powerful enough to solve Sudoku puzzles yet, Jones said.
Sakana has made bold AI claims that didn’t quite pan out before. It had to walk back a claim last month that its latest model could dramatically speed up training. It also claimed an AI-generated paper passed peer review, although the reality was a bit more nuanced than that.
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Nvidia is still in the autonomous vehicle technology game
In previous years, autonomous vehicles played a larger role in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote — a reflection of where the technology stood in the hype cycle at the time. But just because talk of AVs has been supplanted by AI, Nvidia is still very much in the business.
A slew of automated driving deals were announced at the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, including with startups like Gatik, as well as Torc and General Motors. Lucky for you we have a handy roundup that explains exactly what these companies are getting from Nvidia.
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Huang claims tariffs won’t do ‘significant damage’ in the short run
In an interview on Wednesday with CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed that the Trump administration’s tariffs won’t do “significant damage” in the short run.
“We’ve got a lot of AI to build,” he told the publication. “AI is the foundation, the operating system of every industry going forward. … We are enthusiastic about building in America. Partners are working with us to bring manufacturing here.”
Nvidia’s chips are largely fabricated by chipmaker TSMC, which is based in Taiwan. That hasn’t allayed investors’ fears that future, reciprocal tariffs may impact parts of the company’s business, however. TSMC recently pledged to spend “at least” $100 billion on U.S. chip facilities over the next four years.
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Nvidia partners with Google DeepMind and Disney to make robots more lively
Nvidia is collaborating with Disney Research and Google DeepMind to develop Newton, a physics engine to simulate robotic movements in real-world settings, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at GTC 2025 on Tuesday.
Disney will be among the first to use Newton to power its next-generation entertainment robots, like the Star Wars-inspired BDX droids — one of which waddled onstage next to Huang during his Tuesday keynote.
Nvidia plans to release an early, open source version of Newton later in 2025.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang debuts Groot N1, a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, in Disney’s BDX Droids at GTC 2025 pic.twitter.com/irGUmhygjc
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) March 18, 2025 -
Nvidia GTC 2025 live updates: Blackwell Ultra, GM partnerships, and two ‘personal AI supercomputers’
GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, starts this week in San Jose. We’re on the ground covering all the major developments. CEO Jensen Huang will give a keynote address focusing on — what else? — AI and accelerating computing technologies, according to Nvidia.
We’re expecting Huang to reveal more about Nvidia’s next flagship GPU series, Blackwell Ultra, and the next-gen Rubin chip architecture. Also likely on the agenda: automotive, robotics, and lots and lots of AI updates.
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