Technology & Innovation

Author: anonymDate: 2024-11-21 10:24:15

Nvidia declares its Blackwell AI processor is progressing rapidly

The company didn’t discuss reported cooling issues, but says Blackwell is in full production.

Nvidia has ascended to the peak of global market capitalization due to its AI processors, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, and in its Q3 2025 earnings report, the firm indicated that its record-breaking AI revenue and profits represent merely an initial phase. Despite a recent report by The Information suggesting potential cooling problems with its new flagship Blackwell AI servers, the company sidestepped this issue during today's conference call — instead, Nvidia reassured shareholders that Blackwell is in "mass production," is advancing swiftly, and that the company will continue to increase chip shipments each quarter. Nvidia has already dispatched 13,000 Blackwell samples to clients this quarter, according to CFO Colette Kress, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asserted that Blackwell's triumph is already quantifiable in billions of dollars. "As evidenced by the numerous systems being deployed, Blackwell is performing exceptionally well," Huang stated to investors.

While Nvidia has long been recognized for its graphics and gaming operations, as the pioneer of the GPU, its data center ventures have now eclipsed its other business segments by a significant margin. The gaming sector currently generates only $2-3 billion in quarterly revenue for Nvidia, but its AI-powered data centers yielded $30.7 billion this past quarter, comprising the lion's share of its $35 billion in quarterly earnings. A substantial portion of this constitutes pure profit for Nvidia: $14.8 billion in Q1, $16.6 billion in Q2, and now a profit of $19.3 billion in Q3. (Microsoft and Apple reported profits of $24.7 billion and $21.4 billion, respectively, during the same period.) Although AI is not yet a comparably large market for Nvidia's competitor AMD, that company is experiencing a parallel transformation, and is similarly adapting its strategic direction to focus on AI. Both Nvidia and AMD have accelerated their product development cycles, pledging to release new processors to meet AI demand annually rather than biennially. In practice, this results in significant overlap between each new chip generation as businesses place orders and integrate them into data centers. Although Blackwell is Nvidia's latest and most advanced offering, Nvidia announced today that the H200, unveiled last year, is actually its fastest-selling product to date, generating billions of dollars in revenue this past quarter. Nvidia's H100 was its initial breakthrough AI product, although its current success took longer to materialize; Huang anticipates sustained demand for its H-series processors throughout most of next year. Intel, meanwhile, lags significantly in terms of AI success and is currently undergoing restructuring.