To: Johnny Canuck who wrote (59582 ) 8/4/2024 2:37:30 PM From: Johnny Canuck Read Replies (1) | Respond to Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU May Be Delayed. What That Means for the Chip Maker.A report says volume shipments of the Blackwell B200 chip would be delayed some three months.Bill Alpert A report Saturday said one of Nvidia ’s next generation chips will be delayed by a just-discovered design flaw. If true, a few billion dollars in revenue for the chip maker may arrive in early 2025, instead of late 2024, according to calculations from Barron’s . Tech news site The Information, citing a couple of industry sources, said volume shipments of the Blackwell B200 chip would be delayed some three months. The Blackwell chips are the next-generation of the artificial-intelligence acceleration chips that have made Nvidia one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Demand for the company’s current generation Hopper chips still outstrips production. Blackwell volumes were expected to begin in October 2024. Nvidia reports on a January fiscal year, so a delay would push revenue contributions from the B200 into the April 2025 quarter. Nvidia told Barron’s that its story hasn’t changed. “As we’ve stated before, Hopper demand is very strong,” said a spokesperson. “Broad Blackwell sampling has started, and production is on track to ramp in 2H. Beyond that, we don’t comment on rumors.” Tech’s biggest companies are pouring tens of billions of dollars into building data centers to run the generative-AI models that make OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini so clever. Capital spending at Google-parent Alphabet , Amazon.com , Microsoft , and Facebook -parent Meta Platforms totaled nearly $60 billion in the second quarter ended in June, up two-thirds year over year. Much of that spending is going to Nvidia. Here’s the math on the rumored B200 delay: The Blackwell architecture was planned to start shipping in several varieties. There are the B100 and B200 chips, with the latter more powerful and in higher demand. Then there is the GB200, which is faster still because it packages two B200s with a third processor that all share data at high bandwidth. Nvidia may be able to charge $30,000 to $40,000 for the B200, and $50,000 to $70,000 for the GB200, according to Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh. One of the more detailed models out there for Nvidia product sales is from Timothy Arcuri at UBS . As of last month, he was projecting shipments of about 32,500 B200 chips and 43,400 GB200 modules in Nvidia’s quarter ending January 2025. That would be only about 7% of all the accelerators shipped in the quarter because the vast majority of units shipped would still be Hopper chips. Combining both analysts’ intelligence, the January quarter contribution from B200 products would amount to $3 billion. That’s 9% of the $34.5 billion in total revenue expected for the quarter, per the consensus forecast. But even if the delay materializes, the revenue pushout for Nvidia is unlikely to be as large as that. Customers still can’t get all the Hopper chips they want. Nvidia has nearly caught up with demand for the H100 version but the more powerful H200 remains backlogged. So Nvidia could just crank out more Hopper chips and sell all they make. Nvidia is no cheap stock. At the closing price Friday of $107, it trades at 40 times this year’s earnings forecast and 30 times next year’s. But a perturbation in the steep growth of Nvidia’s sales and earnings won’t be the thing that changes its popularity on Wall Street. Write to Bill Alpert at william.alpert@barrons.com
