Nvidia stock rises as CFO says new chips to ship this year

By Max A. Cherney, Stephen Nellis and Medha Singh

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) -Nvidia's stock climbed 1% on Tuesday after the heavyweight chipmaker said its newest flagship AI processor is expected to begin shipping later this year.

Nvidia's stock reversed earlier losses and climbed to about $895 as Chief Executive Jensen Huang and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress answered questions from investors at the company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California.

"We think we're going to come to market later this year," Kress said, referring to the company's new AI chip.

Some analysts said Wall Street has already factored in the debut of the B200 Blackwell chip, which the company claims is 30 times faster at some tasks than its predecessor.

The Blackwell chip will be priced between $30,000 and $40,000, Huang told CNBC.

"The Blackwell technology shows a significant performance uplift compared to Hopper (the current flagship chip) but it's always hard to live up to the hype," said David Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, adding that investors were still digesting an 80% surge in Nvidia's stock so far this year.

Along with the Blackwell chip, which combines two squares of silicon the size of the company's previous offering, Nvidia detailed a new set of software tools on Monday, to help developers sell artificial intelligence models more easily to firms that use its technology.

(Reporting by Medha Singh and Aditya Soni in Bangalore and Stephen Nellis and Max A. Cherney in San Jose, CaliforniaAdditional reporting by Noel Randewich in Oakland, CaliforniaEditing by Pooja Desai and Matthew Lewis)