Nvidia and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) announced Wednesday that the AI chip giant has gifted a supercomputer equipped with its newest technology to a nonprofit organization affiliated with the school.
The NPS is run by the U.S. Navy and provides master’s and doctoral degree programs in areas including computer science and aerospace engineering, with a focus on how those fields apply to modern warfare. The donated system is built around Nvidia’s GB300 “Grace Blackwell” servers — the company’s most sophisticated AI computing hardware — and was given to the NPS Foundation, a nonprofit connected to the institution.
Neither Nvidia nor the NPS revealed how large the system is, but both confirmed it has already been set up at the NPS campus in Monterey, California. Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were scheduled to appear at a campus event to formally announce the donation.
Although Nvidia’s Blackwell chips have been planned for use in U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers, Wednesday’s gift represents the first time the company’s most advanced servers have been put directly into service by the U.S. military.
“AI will be a backbone of America’s defense,” Huang said in a prepared statement.
The announcement comes as both the United States and China are aggressively working to incorporate artificial intelligence into military operations, from building targeting systems to advancing drone warfare capabilities.
“As we modernize our technology, we must also modernize how we educate our leaders,” Adm. Paparo said in a statement. “Access to advanced computing capability means NPS students and faculty understand the opportunities and responsibilities that come with these technologies.”
One key advantage of AI technology is its capacity to rapidly work through complicated, rapidly shifting problems — far faster than conventional computer simulation methods.
“Initially, we will need to carefully manage demand as we bring this capability online,” said Trenton Hancock, chief information officer at NPS, in a statement. “But what this system really gives us is the ability to explore more complex, real-world problems, especially those that mirror the challenges our operational fleet faces every day.”
