Nvidia ships DGX Spark, world's smallest AI supercomputer from $4000

Nvidia has begun shipping the DGX Spark, a compact desktop system the company describes as the world's smallest AI supercomputer, and will open general orders on October 15 through its website and select hardware partners. The unit, aimed at developers, research labs and institutions, starts at about $4,000 and is being distributed by OEM partners including Acer, ASUS, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, HP, Lenovo and MSI.

The DGX Spark centers on Nvidia's GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip and combines a 20 core Arm-based Grace CPU and a Blackwell GPU with a unified 128 gigabytes of LPDDR5x memory shared between CPU and GPU. Nvidia says the system can deliver up to one petaflop of AI performance and includes a compact chassis with multiple USB-C ports, Wi-Fi 7 and an HDMI output. The unit ships with Nvidia's AI software stack preinstalled, including libraries, tools and microservices intended to let users begin model training and inference without extensive configuration. Storage has been reported as a 4 terabyte NVMe drive.

Nvidia positions the Spark as a machine for local development and experimentation, saying it lets developers run inference on models up to 200 billion parameters and...