- Ascent GX10 is Asus’s take on Nvidia’s DGX Spark AI supercomputer
- ServeTheHome spotted the product at GTC 2025 and went hands on
- The site took photos and noted the AI computer is lighter and cheaper
Nvidia has recently been showing off DGX Spark, its Mac Mini-sized AI supercomputer built around the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip.
Originally called Project Digits, the device has been created to bring advanced model development and inferencing directly to desktops. Although it looks like a mini PC, it’s incredibly powerful and designed to handle demanding AI workflows such as fine-tuning, inference, and prototyping without relying entirely on external infrastructure.
Aimed at developers, researchers, data scientists, and students working with increasingly complex AI models locally, it comes with 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory and up to 4TB of NVMe SSD storage. The DGX Spark isn’t cheap at $3999, but if you’re looking to save some money without cutting corners, there are some alternatives.
The lighter choice
Dell’s Pro Max with GB10 and HP’s ZGX Nano AI Station are DGX Spark clones, built around the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. Asus also has its own GB10 AI supercomputer clone, the Ascent GX10, which is priced at $2999, significantly less than Nvidia’s offering.
Shown off at Nvidia GTC 2025, (as, naturally, was Nvidia’s own DGX Spark), the Ascent GX10 comes with 128GB of unified memory, and the Blackwell GPU with fifth-generation Tensor Cores and FP4 precision support. While DGX Spark has 4TB of storage, Asus’s version only has 1TB.
ServeTheHome was at the conference and spotted the Ascent GX10 on Asus’s stand where it snapped a few photos of the product.
The site also noted, “The front of the system has the ASUS logo and a power button. This may sound strange, but ASUS using plastic on the outside of the chassis in parts versus Nvidia using more metal is an interesting trade-off. Nvidia DGX Spark feels in hand much more like the Apple Mac Studio from a density perspective while the Asus felt lighter. If you truly want this to be a portable AI box, then ASUS may have a leg up, especially if you want to cluster it.“
On the rear of the system, STH says there’s an HDMI port, four high-speed USB4 40Gbps ports, a 10GbE NIC for base networking, and a dual-port Nvidia ConnectX-7, which Nvidia described as an Ethernet version of the CX7 designed for RDMA clustering.
STH’s Patrick Kennedy noted, “For some context here, a Nvidia ConnectX-7 NIC these days often sells for $1500–2200 in single unit quantities, depending on the features and supply of the parts. At $2999 for a system with this built-in that is awesome. Our sense is that folks are going to quickly figure out how to cluster these beyond the 2-unit cluster that Nvidia is going to support at first.”
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waynewilliams@onmail.com (Wayne Williams)
