An amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee, Luke Durant, has discovered the largest known prime number, surpassing the previous record holder by more than 16 million digits. This discovery, made using a free program called GIMPS, involved thousands of GPUs across 24 data centers in 17 countries. The new prime number, 2^136,279,841 – 1, contains over 41 million decimal digits and is the 52nd known Mersenne prime.