NVIDIA Confirms Changes To Blackwell AI GPUs To Improve Yields, Says It Will Ship Several Billion Dollars In Blackwell Revenue In Q4

NVIDIA has confirmed that they have made certain changes to Blackwell AI chips to improve their yield & will be shipping several billion dollars worth of units in Q4.

During its Q2 FY 2025 earnings call, NVIDIA refuted all rumors regarding the Blackwell delay and stated that they only had to make certain changes to help improve the production yield of the chips, while staying on track for ramp next quarter. In lithography, a specific template is used that is called a photomask or mask in short form which is used to create patterns on semiconductor wafers.

NVIDIA is confirming that it "executed a change" to the Blackwell GPU mask made at TSMC using the 4NP process node, which should further help improve production yield. This isn't a major architectural redesign or change and the silicon is still on track for production ramp beginning in the fourth quarter and will continue into FY2026.

The change to the mask is complete there were no functional changes necessary. Functional samples of Blackwell Blackwell in a variety of system configurations as we speak.

Jensen Huang - NVIDIA CEO (Q2 FY25 Earnings Call)

NVIDIA also states that it expects to ship several billion dollars worth of Blackwell hardware in Q4, which should highlight its future earnings.

With that said, Hopper is still very much in demand, and shipments are expected to increase in the second half of FY2025. Just a few hours ago, NVIDIA announced the general availability of its HGX H200 AI systems through various OEM partners which are now readily available for the enterprise and data center customers.

We shipped customer samples of our Blackwell architecture in the second quarter. We executed a change to the Blackwell GPU mask to improve production yield. Blackwell production ramp is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter and continue into fiscal 2026. In the fourth quarter, we expect to ship several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue. Hopper demand is strong, and shipments are expected to increase in the second half of fiscal 2025.

“Hopper demand remains strong, and the anticipation for Blackwell is incredible,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVIDIA achieved record revenues as global data centers are in full throttle to modernize the entire computing stack with accelerated computing and generative AI.”

Gaming revenue was up 16% from a year ago and up 9% sequentially. These increases reflect higher sales of our GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs and game console SOCs. We had solid demand in the second quarter for our gaming GPUs as part of the back-to-school season.

via NVIDIA

NVIDIA's Blackwell has already showcased some strong performance figures in the latest MLPerf Inference v4.1 benchmarks and even Hopper has shown uplifts thanks to continued optimization of the CUDA and AI software stack.

NVIDIA also posted its highest-ever gaming revenue during Q2 FY2025, raking in $2.880 Billion, an increase of 8.8% over the previous quarter and 15.8% versus the previous year. NVIDIA says that it was the result of higher sales of its GeForce RTX 40 series and solid demand for both desktop cards and laptops during the back-to-school season.