NVIDIA: Our GPUs are not vulnerable to Meltdown or Spectre

Earlier this week, NVIDIA rolled out a new GeForce driver release with a security update related to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. These CPU vulnerabilities were made public last week, Meltdown affected Intel in a huge way, while Spectre is a broader problem for the industry.

The update sparked some speculation that NVIDIA's GPUs may be vulnerable too but that was unfounded. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang commented to TechCrunch that NVIDIA's GPUs are safe. He clarified the updates patch the CPU security vulnerability, similar to the updates from Microsoft and others:

“Our GPUs are immune, they’re not affected by these security issues,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a general press Q&A this morning. “What we did is we released driver updates to patch the CPU security vulnerability. We are patching the CPU vulnerability the same way that Amazon , the same way that SAP, the same way that Microsoft, etc are patching, because we have software as well.”

Huang explained that anyone running any kind of software has to patch that software for the CPU vulnerabilities discovered by researchers. He stressed that in no way is Nvidia patching for any issues in its own hardware.

“I am absolutely certain that our GPU is not affected,” Huang said, in no uncertain terms.