Nvidia just released the most insanely powerful graphics processor ever made

Nvidia just announced the Titan V, the most powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) of all time.

This isn't the type of graphics card your gamer friends all bought on Black Friday, either. This is a graphics card powerful enough for use on research in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The GPU contains 21.1 billion (yes, billion) transistors, and delivers 110 teraflops of horsepower, 9 times that of any other Nvidia processor. For perspective, the Xbox One X delivers only six teraflops, and that was really impressive when it was announced earlier this year.

Don't get any ideas, though — the Titan V is $3,000. Good gaming GPUs are usually $500-$600.

But it could mean huge things for research into and development of artificial intelligence. In October, Google's AI AlphaGo Zero became the best Go player in the world, in what was widely considered to be a massive leap forward in deep learning, using $25 million worth of computing hardware.

With such a powerful and efficient GPU freeing up resources for other innovations, it's exciting (and terrifying) to imagine what the next big AI will be able to do.