Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has sought to allay concerns over the reported late arrival of the Blackwell GPU architecture and the lack of return on investment from AI investments.
@NVIDIA CEO: Blackwell chip 'is a big step in AI' #shorts
"The demand is so great that the delivery of our components and our technology and our infrastructure and software is really emotional for people because it directly affects their revenue, it directly affects their competitiveness," Huang explained, according to a transcript of remarks he made at Goldman Sachs Tech Conference on Wednesday. "It's really tense. We have a lot of responsibility on our shoulders and we're trying our best."
The comments follow reports that Nvidia's next-generation Blackwell accelerators will not ship in the second half of 2024, as Huang has previously promised. The GPU giant's admission of a manufacturing error — which required a mask replacement — during its second-quarter earnings call last month hasn't helped that perception. But speaking to Goldman Sachs' Toshiya Hari on Wednesday, Huang reiterated that Blackwell chips were already in full production and would start shipping in calendar Q4.
Unveiled at Nvidia's GTC conference last spring, the GPU architecture promises between 2.5x and 5x higher performance and more than double the memory capacity and bandwidth of the H100-class units it replaces. At the time, Nvidia said the chips would ship sometime in the second half of the year.
