Nvidia Fixes Design Flaw in Blackwell AI Chip, TSMC Helps Overcome Production Challenges

Nvidia Fixes Design Flaw in Blackwell AI Chip, TSMC Helps Overcome Production ChallengesOn Wednesday, October 24, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company had successfully fixed a design flaw in its Blackwell AI chip, which had previously impacted production, with support from long-term manufacturing partner TSMC. Despite this, shares of the AI chip giant still fell about 2% in early trading

Nvidia Fixes Design Flaw in Blackwell AI Chip, TSMC Helps Overcome Production Challenges

On Wednesday, October 24, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company had successfully fixed a design flaw in its Blackwell AI chip, which had previously impacted production, with support from long-term manufacturing partner TSMC. Despite this, shares of the AI chip giant still fell about 2% in early trading.

Nvidia unveiled the Blackwell chip in March this year and announced plans to start shipping in the second quarter. However, the company faced delays in shipments, which may have impacted customers including Meta, Alphabet (Google's parent company), and Microsoft.

Huang acknowledged, "Blackwell did have a design flaw. It was functional, but the design deficiency resulted in low yield. This was completely Nvidia's responsibility."

There were rumors of tension between Nvidia and TSMC due to the production delays, but Huang clarified that these reports were "fake news." He further explained, "We actually designed seven different types of chips from scratch to make Blackwell work and had to manufacture them all simultaneously. TSMC played a critical role in helping us overcome the yield issue and rapidly accelerated the production of Blackwell."

Nvidia's Blackwell chip utilizes silicon dies twice the size of the company's previous offerings, combining two dies into one package. This results in a 30-fold performance improvement when executing tasks such as providing answers for chatbots. During a recent investment conference hosted by Goldman Sachs, Huang revealed that these chips are expected to ship in the fourth quarter.

Furthermore, Huang also unveiled a new supercomputer called Gefion in Denmark on Wednesday. This machine boasts 1528 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and was built in collaboration between Nvidia, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, and the Danish Export and Investment Fund.

The design flaw and production delays in the Blackwell chip posed challenges for Nvidia, but the company ultimately overcame these obstacles. TSMC played a crucial role throughout the process, helping Nvidia resume production of the Blackwell chip. The success of the Blackwell chip will further solidify Nvidia's position in the AI landscape and create more possibilities for its future development.