NVIDIA expects Blackwell to sell out quick, but that’s just the nature of new products, says Jensen

The company’s supply chain is doing an outstanding job, but they can’t meet the demand at launch.

NVIDIA is on the brink of unveiling its upcoming Blackwell GPU architecture designed for the next wave of data-center products. While speculations suggest there might be consumer GPUs based on this architecture as well, everyone should realize where NVIDIA’s focus will be. The last quarter company’s revenue distribution shows data-center generating 6.4 times more income (US$ 18.4B) than gaming (US$ 2.86B),

Businesses anticipating the release of NVIDIA’s next-gen GPU architecture should consider planning ahead. Even before the official launch of Blackwell, NVIDIA is already acknowledging constrained supply due to soaring demand, a phenomenon not unfamiliar in the semiconductor industry.

“We expect our next-generation products to be supply constrained as demand far exceeds supply,”

— Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer at NVIDIA

What is important to note is that this quote is only regarding data-center. Kress did not make any comments on the next-gen consumer product supply. Jensen later expanded on this topic through a different question.

[…] with all of the new products, demand is greater than supply. And that’s just kind of the nature of new products and so we work as fast as we can to capture the demand. But overall, overall net-net, overall, our supply is increasing very nicely.

— Jensen Huang, Chief Executive Officer at NVIDIA

Jensen Huang mentioned that this is just a nature of all new products and something the company has been facing for a while. While this quote focuses on data-center products, we have seen similar supply problems with many consumer graphics cards over the past few years, even more so during the pandemic and crypto-craze supply issues. The most recent launch has been relatively problem-free, with only one SKU seeing lower supply, the RTX 4080 SUPER.

Blackwell GPU series expected by 2025, Source: NVIDIA

NVIDIA should unveil their Blackwell GPU series at GTC 2024 this year, with the availability expected to follow later. The new data-center products will feature three products: B100, B40 and GB200, the latter succeeding NVIDIA’s newest endeavor of ‘Super Chip’ series which is a combination of ARM cores with GPU.

Source: Seeking Alpha