NVIDIA's Blackwell AI Chip Delay: Potential Impact on Tech Giants and AI Industry

How Nvidia's AI Chip Setbacks Could Impact Major Tech Giants

Explore the potential delays in Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips launch and its impact on major tech companies. A tech publication, The Information, reported that Nvidia, one of the largest chipmakers, may face a setback of three months or more in launching its next artificial intelligence (AI) chips due to design flaws. A delay such as this will hurt major customers like Meta Platforms, Google, and Microsoft, which have ordered tens of billions of dollars worth of advanced chips from the company. rolled out its Blackwell chip series in March, positioning them to succeed its flagship Grace Hopper Superchip, designed to accelerate generative AI applications. An said, "As we've said before, Hopper demand is very strong, broad Blackwell sampling has started, and production is on track to ramp in the second half." However, according to reports, Nvidia informed Microsoft and at least one other major cloud service provider of a delay in producing its most advanced AI chip within the Blackwell series. Microsoft has chosen not to comment further on the situation, while Meta and Google have yet to respond to requests for comments.

Nvidia's AI Chip Delay Could Be Bad News For Google And Microsoft: Report

Design flaws could cause a delay of three months or more in the launch of chip giant Nvidia's upcoming artificialintelligence chips, techfocused publication the Information said on Friday. (Reuters) - Design flaws could cause a delay of three months or more in the launch of chip giant Nvidia's upcoming artificial-intelligence chips, tech-focused publication the Information said on Friday. The setback could affect customers such as Meta Platforms, Alphabet's Google and Microsoft, which have collectively ordered tens of billions of dollars' worth of chips, it said, citing people who help produce chip and server hardware for Nvidia. The AI chip company unveiled its Blackwell chip series in March, succeeding its earlier flagship AI chip, the Grace Hopper Superchip, that was designed to speed generative AI applications. "As we've stated before, Hopper demand is very strong, broad Blackwell sampling has started, and production is on track to ramp in the second half," an Nvidia spokesperson said in an emailed statement in response to the report. Microsoft said it had nothing to add, while Meta and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nvidia informed Microsoft and another major cloud service provider this week of a delay in the production of its most advanced AI chip in the Blackwell series, the Information said, citing a Microsoft employee and another person with knowledge of the matter.

Blackwell AI Chips from NVIDIA Reportedly Delayed by Months

NVIDIA has reportedly discovered some "design flaws" in its upcoming line of Blackwell AI chips that might push their release back by at least three months. While the chips were originally anticipated to arrive in the next few months, they're now expected to ship in early 2025. According to The Information, the company has started notifying customers, which include the Google, Meta, and Microsoft of the delay. The chips were announced in March and offer a performance boost of up to 30x what can be achieved by the company's H100 chip, which is used by a number of AI systems today. The company has also said that the chips could reduce cost and energy consumption by up to 25x. News of the delay comes just days after we learned that NVIDIA is facing two investigations from the US Department of Justice over its AI practices. Specifically, the investigations are looking into whether the company violated any US antitrust laws with its $700 million April acquisition of Israeli AI startup Run:AI and if the company unfairly pressured cloud computing firms to purchase its chips. NVIDIA is also reportedly building a version of the upcoming chip specifically for the Chinese market. The chip is currently being called B20, and is being designed so the brand can take advantage of China's computing market while still adhering to US export rules.

Report: Design flaw discovery set to delay launch of Nvidia's new Blackwell GPUs - SiliconANGLE

Report: Design flaw discovery set to delay launch of Nvidia's new Blackwell GPUs Chipmaker Nvidia Corp. has told Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Google LLC and other customers that its upcoming "Blackwell" B200 graphics processing units for artificial intelligence workloads are likely to be delayed by at least three months. A report by The Information says that one of Nvidia's key manufacturing partners has discovered a "design flaw" that will prevent the chips from launching on time. The flaw was discovered "unusually late" during the production process, anonymous sources revealed. The Blackwell GPUs are the successor to Nvidia's hugely popular and in-demand H100 chips, which are used to power the vast majority of generative AI applications in the world today. They were first announced in March, and are said to deliver a performance boost of up to 30-times over the H100, while reducing energy consumption by as much as 25% in some workloads. The delay was unexpected, as Nvidia said just three months ago that its "Blackwell-based products" will be available from its partners later this year. They were slated as being the first major release in a cadence of AI chip updates from semiconductor firms, with rivals like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. also set to launch their own products in the coming months. According to The Information, the problem has to do with the processor die that connects two Blackwell GPUs on a single Nvidia GB200 Superchip (pictured), which is the first product set to feature the new GPUs. The problem was reportedly identified by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which mass produces the chips on behalf of Nvidia. The discovery has apparently forced Nvidia to revise the design of the die, and it will need a few months to conduct production tests with TSMC before it can start mass producing the chips as planned. If true, the delay is expected to cause significant disruption for Nvidia's customers, many of whom have plans to get new AI data centers up and running early next year. Google, for example, is believed to have placed orders for more than 400,000 of the GB200 chips, in a deal valued at more than $10 billion. Meta has also placed a similar order, while Microsoft wants to have 55,000 to 65,000 GB200 chips ready for OpenAI by the first quarter of next year. To make up for the delay, Nvidia is considering producing a single GPU version of the Blackwell chip, so it can fulfill some of its first orders. For Nvidia, it makes sense to delay the launch of the Blackwell GPUs, rather than ship out potentially faulty products. Such a move is not without precedent in the industry. Just last month, AMD announced it will be pushing back the launch of its Ryzen 9000 central processing units due to a simple typo. A delay is better than a catastrophic failure - such as what appears to have happened with Intel Corp.'s 13th and 14th-generation Core processors. The likely cost of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs makes it even more vital that the company gets the product right. It's said that the AI GB200 Grace Blackwell superchips will cost up to $70,000 apiece, while a complete server rack costs more than $3 million. Nvidia is reportedly expecting to sell between 60,000 and 70,000 complete servers, so any flaws like the one found in Intel's chips would be hugely expensive and damaging to the company's reputation. In any case, Nvidia can probably afford the delay. In the AI chip market, the company is the undisputed leader, with many analysts saying it commands as much as 90% of global AI chip sales. While competitors like AMD and Intel have developed their own AI chips, they are yet to gain any significant traction in the market. In response to The Information's report, a spokesperson for Nvidia said "Hopper demand is very strong, broad Blackwell sampling has started, and production is on track to ramp in the second half." The delay is the second setback to hit Nvidia in recent days. Last week, it was revealed that the chipmaker is the subject of two investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice over its AI practices. One of the probes is said to be looking at whether Nvidia's $700 million acquisition of the Israeli AI startup Run:AI Inc. might have breached antitrust laws, while the second is looking into claims that it unfairly pressured cloud computing companies to buy its chips.

Nvidia delays Blackwell GPUs until 2025, say reports

Backdrop of multi-billion dollar orders to support AI services, but unlikely to hurt NVDA long term Nvidia is understood to be delaying shipments of its Blackwell GPUs until the first quarter of 2025, and it appears the problems may be due to the complexity of the chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging tech that TSMC is using to manufacture the next-gen hardware. The GPU giant recently informed Microsoft about delays affecting the most advanced models in the Blackwell family, according to The Information. We have asked Nvidia for confirmation. The issue could mean that volume shipments of chips such as the Blackwell B200 will be delayed by three months or more, disrupting the plans of customers such as Microsoft and Meta, which have reportedly placed orders worth billions of dollars for the new GPUs to drive their AI services. It also means that Nvidia may have to cancel or postpone some products, in order to focus available supply of silicon on those it considers the highest priority. The main issue behind these delays to GPU shipments is related to Nvidia's design of the Blackwell architecture, according to a report from semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis. Specifically, Blackwell is the first high volume design to use the CoWoS-L packaging technology from TSMC, Nvidia's chip manufacturer. CoWoS is a way of enabling more complex and advanced products to be engineered using chiplets that are interconnected, typically a system-on-chip (SoC) and one or more high bandwidth memory (HBM) chiplets. However, CoWoS-L is a whole different level of complexity over CoWoS-S, where the chiplets are mounted on a relatively simple silicon interposer. CoWoS-L instead uses an organic interposer that acts as a redistribution layer (RDL) to route signals between the chiplets on top, making use of local silicon interconnects (LSIs) and bridge dies that are embedded in the interposer. An organic interposer is required in order to scale CoWoS packages larger than AMD's MI300 GPU, SemiAnalysis says, as silicon is brittle and handling very thin silicon interposers gets harder as the interposer gets larger. The LSIs and bridge dies help to compensate for the poorer electrical performance of the organic interposer. Yet a number of issues have emerged with the technology, the analyst says. One is that embedding multiple silicon bridges in the interposer can cause a thermal expansion mismatch between the silicon dies, bridges, organic interposer, and substrate, leading to a warping of the substrate that can break connections. However, the main causes of the delay are the bridge dies, which are thought to need a redesign, according to the SemiAnalysis report, along with a redesign of the top few global routing metal layers and bump out of the Blackwell die itself. And there is the issue of TSMC not having enough CoWoS packaging capacity to meet demand, as has been reported numerous times. The problem here is that TSMC built up CoWoS-S capacity over the last couple years, largely to service Nvidia, but now the GPU maker is switching its products to CoWoS-L, SemiAnalysis claims. While TSMC is building a new fab for CoWoS-L production, the semiconductor contract manufacturer urgently needs to convert its old CoWoS-S capacity in order to be able to keep up with demand. In the meantime, Nvidia has to make choices about how to use the supply available to it from TSMC. Consequently, Semi says it believes the company is focusing almost entirely on the GB200 NVL36/72 rack scale systems, and that HGX form-factors with the B100 and B200 are "effectively now being cancelled outside of some initial lower volumes." In order to satisfy demand, Nvidia will also bring to market a Blackwell GPU called the B200A, based on the B102 die that is additionally earmarked for Nvidia's "China special" B20 GPU. This B102 is a single monolithic die with 4 stacks of HBM that allows the chip to be packaged on CoWoS-S instead of CoWoS-L, according to SemiAnalysis. All of this is unlikely to hurt Nvidia too much. Financial news site Barron's says that the GPU maestro may find a few billion dollars in revenue arrive in early 2025 instead of late 2024, but that customers still can't get all the Hopper chips they want, so the company could just crank out more of those. However Nvidia may face further problems with the B20. According to a report by the South China Morning Post, Washington is considering a further tightening of export restrictions that would prevent the new GPU being sold in China, its intended market. Late last year, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo warned that the US would have to keep tightening restrictions to prevent its export controls on AI-capable chips being circumvented. "If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day," she said at the time. ®

Nvidia Upcoming Chip Launch Faces Delay Due To Design Flaws -- Setback Expected To Impact Meta, Microsoft And Google: Report - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Nvidia Corporation NVDA has reportedly encountered delays in the production of its upcoming AI chips due to design issues. This setback is expected to impact major clients including Meta Platforms Inc. META, Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google, and Microsoft Corporation MSFT. What Happened: The delay was reported last week by The Information, which cited two anonymous sources involved in the chip's production and server hardware. The delay could extend for three months or more, affecting the delivery of the advanced AI chip models in the Blackwell series, reported Bloomberg. Nvidia informed Microsoft about the delay earlier this week, according to an unidentified Microsoft employee and another source. As a result, large shipments of the Blackwell series are now expected in the first quarter of 2025, the report noted. Subscribe to the Benzinga Tech Trends newsletter to get all the latest tech developments delivered to your inbox. The AI chip company introduced its Blackwell chip series in March, following the release of its previous flagship AI chip, the Grace Hopper Superchip, which was designed to accelerate generative AI applications. While Nvidia declined to comment on its customer communications regarding the delay, a spokesperson assured that "production is on track to ramp" later this year. The chip giant did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comments. Why It Matters: This delay comes at a time when Nvidia's AI chips are in high demand. Last month, AI infrastructure startup CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Mike Intrator highlighted the "relentless" demand for Nvidia's AI chips. "The market that we are seeing -- and we are very close to the true demand for this infrastructure -- is relentless. It has been in a state of severe disequilibrium for the past two and a half years," Intrator stated at the time. Previously, it was also reported that Nvidia has been developing a new version of its flagship AI chip for the Chinese market amid U.S. export restrictions. The chip, named "B20," was part of the Blackwell series and was set to be mass-produced later this year. Check out more of Benzinga's Consumer Tech coverage by following this link. Read Next: Satya Nadella Says Microsoft's Copilot Drives 40% Of GitHub's Revenue Growth: We Are Also 'Enabling Anyone To Use Natural Language To Create Apps...' Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Delay to Nvidia's new AI chip could affect Microsoft, Google, Meta - VnExpress International

Design flaws could cause a delay of three months or more in the launch of chip giant Nvidia's upcoming artificial-intelligence chips, tech-focused publication the Information said on Friday. The setback could affect customers such as Meta Platforms, Alphabet's, Google and Microsoft, which have collectively ordered tens of billions of dollars' worth of chips, it said, citing people who help produce chip and server hardware for Nvidia. The AI chip company unveiled its Blackwell chip series in March, succeeding its earlier flagship AI chip, the Grace Hopper Superchip, that was designed to speed generative AI applications. "As we've stated before, Hopper demand is very strong, broad Blackwell sampling has started, and production is on track to ramp in the second half," an Nvidia spokesperson said in an emailed statement in response to the report. Microsoft said it had nothing to add, while Meta and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nvidia informed Microsoft and another major cloud service provider this week of a delay in the production of its most advanced AI chip in the Blackwell series, the Information said, citing a Microsoft employee and another person with knowledge of the matter.