Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed on Wednesday that a design flaw in the company's latest Blackwell AI chips has been fixed, thanks to assistance from longtime partner TSMC. The flaw, which affected production yields, caused delays in shipping the highly anticipated chips, originally slated for the second quarter of 2024.
The delay impacted key customers such as Meta Platforms, Google, and Microsoft, leading to a dip in Nvidia's stock, which fell about 2 per cent in early trading. Huang took full responsibility for the issue, acknowledging that the low yield was "100 per cent Nvidia's fault."
The Blackwell chips, unveiled in March, are a major advancement in AI processing, featuring a unique design that combines two large silicon components into a single unit, offering 30 times the speed of Nvidia’s previous generation for tasks like chatbot interactions. Despite reports of tensions between Nvidia and TSMC over the production delays, Huang dismissed these as false, crediting TSMC for helping the company quickly recover and resume manufacturing at a rapid pace.
At a recent Goldman Sachs conference, Huang announced that the Blackwell chips will now ship in the fourth quarter. He made these comments while in Denmark to launch the Gefion supercomputer, a project built in collaboration with the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Denmark's Export and Investment Fund.
