Nvidia opens a new tab (NVDA.O). On Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang announced that a design problem in its most recent Blackwell AI chips that affected production had been resolved with the assistance of TSMC (2330.TW), a longstanding Taiwanese manufacturing partner.
Early trading saw a 2% decline in the shares of the AI chip company. Potentially impacting clients including Meta Platforms (META.O), Alphabet (GOOGL.O), Google, and Microsoft (MSFT.O), Nvidia launched Blackwell chips in March and had previously stated that they would ship in the second quarter. However, this was postponed. “We had a design flaw in Blackwell,” stated Huang. “It worked, but the yield was poor because of a design error. Nvidia was solely to blame for that.
Nvidia and TSMC were at odds over the manufacturing delay, according to media sources, but Huang brushed it off as “fake news.” “In order to make a Blackwell computer work, seven different types of chips were designed from scratch and had to be ramped into production at the same time,” he stated.
“What TSMC did, was to help us recover from that yield difficulty and resume the manufacturing of Blackwell at an incredible pace.” Nvidia’s Blackwell chips combine two silicon squares the size of the company’s last product to create a single unit that is 30 times faster at activities like providing chatbot responses.
The chips will now ship in the fourth quarter, according to the CEO at a recent Goldman Sachs conference. Huang visited Denmark on Wednesday to introduce Gefion, a new supercomputer with 1,528 GPUs that was developed in collaboration with Nvidia, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund.
