Not long ago AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series was delayed due to QA issues and not meeting requirements. Now according to a Bloomberg report (thanks to VideoCardz), Nvidia has informed Microsoft that the new AI Blackwell chips are going to be delayed, now it expects to ship big amounts in Q1 2025. That might come to the gaming market as well as the RTX 50 series release date rumors have also suggested a late 2024 release or even the start of 2025 that might line up with these big enterprise graphics cards.
It doesn’t help that the US has launched an antitrust probe into Nvidia’s practices after complaints from its competitors like AMD and Intel. But now its own designs are seemingly slowing it down, although it hadn’t confirmed the release of these chips. The Bloomberg reports two sources in the chip production process have said the AI chips will have to be delayed due to design flaws. Expecting a three-month or more delay pushing it back to 2025 for customers including Meta, Google, and Microsoft.
Nvidia’s Blackwell AI expectations
This delay will affect quite a large number of chips. According to DCD Nvidia already increased its TSMC orders by 25% for Blackwell GPUs to try and cover off its demand. This is to cover the 40,000 Blackwell units it expected to ship but has been upgraded up to 60,000, with 50,000 of those units being just the GB200 NVL36.
These whole racks don’t come cheap either and what boosted Nvidia to the top three companies in the market. As the NVL36 comprises 36 GB200 super chips, 18 Grace CPUs, and 36 enhanced B200 GPUs. All together this comes to an average sale price of $1.8 million according to UDN estimates. Then the NVL72 with double the hardware comes to around $3 million.
So if the 50,000 of the NVL36 do sell for that price, Nvidia would be expecting to rack in $90 billion for that run. So it does have quite the stakes in delivering these units and making sure these function correctly. As AMD said about its delay “Better safe than sorry” As you don’t want the customer to have a bad experience and ruin your reputation, just look to Intel’s instability issues.
