Shipments of Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell architecture could be delayed for three months or more, according to published reports.
Design flaws will delay the launch of Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture by three months or more, according to a report in The Information.
Blackwell is the successor to Hopper, the current generation on the market. It was supposed to ship in the fourth quarter of this year, but The Information reports that Nvidia informed Microsoft, a major customer of its GPUs, that it would not be able to ship product for at least three more months, pushing the launch into the first quarter of next year.
And if Microsoft is impacted, then so are other major customers like Meta (Facebook), Google, and Oracle. And if they are impacted, enterprises can forget about getting their own orders in, because Nvidia is going to prioritize its hyperscale cloud customers.
According to a report from semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis, the problem lies in the manufacturing process, and it points to a problem in the packaging of the chip. “The core issue impacting shipments is directly related to Nvidia’s design of the Blackwell architecture. The supply of the original Blackwell package is limited due to packaging issues at TSMC and with Nvidia’s design,” writes SemiAnalysis.
The SemiAnalysis report goes into great detail about what’s wrong – well beyond my technical understanding. But it’s clear that Blackwell is an exceptionally complex piece of silicon, and there is plenty of opportunity for something to go wrong, which it did. The problem is as much TSMC’s to solve as it is Nvidia’s.
An Nvidia rep issued the following statement: “As we’ve stated before, Hopper demand is very strong, broad Blackwell sampling has started, and production is on track to ramp in 2H. Beyond that, we don’t comment on rumors.”
But as one analyst told me, if there is indeed a delay in shipping product, and if the delay could materially affect earnings, Nvidia will have to disclose it.
Because Nvidia favors the hyperscalers that drop billions of dollars at a time on their orders, those customers will be the ones most likely to feel the pinch. Enterprise adoption goes at a slower pace, and they’re likely just now beginning to deploy Hopper-based systems. So if you have an order for some Hopper-based systems, you don’t need to worry too much.
Earlier this year, Nvidia announced it would introduce a new microarchitecture every year instead of every two years, as it had been doing. At the time, I felt that this was full of risk and could potentially blow up in Nvidia’s face because it left no room for error. It would require flawless execution, and nobody’s perfect, not even Nvidia.
And now it seems it has happened. One frustrating part for Nvidia is that this problem is outside of its control. It’s a manufacturing issue with TSMC. Yes, the two companies work together on the packaging of the product, but the primary responsibility lies with TSMC.
This should give AMD pause, because it, too, has announced plans to have new GPU architecture every year for its increasingly popular Instinct line. If anyone knows the consequences of a misstep, it’s AMD. It was cruising along just fine in 2006 with a strongly competitive product against Intel before the Barcelona disaster – a new architecture that tried to do too much at once and ended up shipping late and underperforming. AMD lost all of its momentum and spent the next decade wandering the wilderness getting trounced by Intel before the Zen resurgence. AMD doesn’t need that again.
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