Nvidia CEO says power-saving optical chip tech will need to wait for wider use

A promising new chip technology that aims to cut energy usage is not yet reliable enough for use in Nvidia's flagship graphics processing units, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday. During a keynote address to Nvidia's annual developer conference at a packed hockey stadium in San Jose, California on Tuesday, Huang said his company would use the co-packaged optical technology in two new networking chips that sit in switches on top of its servers, saying the technology would make the chips three and a half times more energy efficient than their predecessors. But Huang told a group of journalists after his speech that while Nvidia examined using it more widely in its flagship GPU chips it had no current plans to do so, because traditional copper connections were "orders of magnitude" more reliable than today's co-packaged optical connections. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors have pinned their hopes on the optics technology, which they believe will be central to building ever-larger computers for AI systems, which Huang said on Tuesday would still be necessary even after advances by companies like DeepSeek because AI systems would need more computing power to think through their answers.