NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang Gives Away 20 ‘CEO Edition’ TITAN Vs To AI Researchers In Salt Lake City

NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang is no stranger to gifting powerful hardware to researchers, and this week continued his generosity by awarding twenty TITAN Vs to AI researchers at Salt Lake City’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference this week. If that sounds like an awfully specific event, it definitely is, but there are few better suited to involve GPUs into the conversation.

These 20 folks didn’t just receive standard TITAN Vs, but instead special “CEO Edition” models. How do these differ from the standard fare TITAN Vs? That’s a great question, and one that isn’t answered at the related blog post. It could be unique only because of the box; no bare card is shown, so it’s expected that it will still follow the same gold scheme as before.

In addition to the gifting of TITAN Vs (hey, Uncle Jensen, we’d still like to test one!), Huang also gave out 12 Pioneer awards to teams that have been using NVIDIA’s AI platform to get their work done. Besides having market-leading single-precision performance, the TITAN V has uncapped half- and double-precision performance, and Tensor cores to dramatically accelerate AI research. With 125 TFLOPS of FP16 performance, these new TITAN V owners will have a lot of muscle on-hand to tackle their most complex workloads. The 32GB of HBM2 memory sure doesn’t hurt, either.

To say that Huang appreciates these researchers would be an understatement. He said to the 500-strong event: “As someone who benefits from your work, as a person who is going to enjoy the incredible research you guys do — solving some of the world’s grand challenges — and to be able to witness artificial intelligence happen in my lifetime, I want to thank all of you guys for that.”

Well said.