Nvidia’s new Blackwell processors, yet to be released, are already sold out for the next year, according to recent reports. This news reflects the high demand in the artificial intelligence chip market.
Unprecedented Demand
According to a client note published by Joseph Moore, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, after a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other company executives, the Blackwell GPUs are “reserved for 12 months.” This means that customers who have not already placed their orders will not receive Blackwell products until late 2025.
Technical Features
Nvidia announced the Blackwell GPU family in March of this year. These processors are manufactured using a custom TSMC 4NP process of two reticles, with GPU cores connected by a 10TBps chip-to-chip link in a single unified GPU. The Blackwell GPUs feature 208 billion transistors, a significant increase from the 80 billion in the Hopper series. Additionally, they include a second-generation transformer engine and new 4-bit floating point AI inference capabilities.
First Deployments and Orders
Microsoft has become the first cloud to deploy Nvidia’s GB200 AI servers. The company announced on X (formerly Twitter): “Microsoft Azure is the first cloud running Nvidia’s Blackwell system with servers powered by GB200.” Other tech companies like Google, Meta, and CoreWeave have also placed orders for Blackwell GPUs.
Shipping and Sales Expectations
The products are expected to start shipping this quarter, after a delay due to an unexpected design flaw that has since been resolved. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress stated in August during the third quarter earnings call of 2024 that the company expected to ship “several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue” during the last quarter of 2024.
This situation underscores Nvidia’s dominant position in the AI chip market and bodes well for the company’s promising future in this rapidly expanding sector.