NVIDIA has revealed they have made adjustments to their Blackwell AI chips to enhance production yield, and they plan to ship several billion dollars’ worth of units in Q4.
In their Q2 FY 2025 earnings call, NVIDIA dismissed any rumors of Blackwell delays. They explained that changes were made solely to improve the yield of the chips, maintaining their schedule for an increase in production next quarter. The changes involved adjustments to the Blackwell GPU mask, produced at TSMC using the 4NP process node. This is not a significant architectural change, and production will still commence in the fourth quarter, continuing into FY2026. NVIDIA anticipates shipping several billion dollars’ worth of Blackwell hardware in Q4, which will likely be a significant highlight for their future earnings.
Despite the focus on Blackwell, the demand for Hopper remains strong, with shipments expected to grow in the latter half of FY2025. NVIDIA also announced the general availability of its HGX H200 AI systems through various OEM partners, now accessible to enterprise and data center customers.
Customer samples of the Blackwell architecture were shipped in the second quarter. After improving the production yield through changes to the GPU mask, the production ramp for Blackwell is set for the fourth quarter, with an expectation to generate several billion dollars in revenue. Hopper demand remains robust, with shipments anticipated to rise during the second half of fiscal 2025.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, stated that global data centers are accelerating their modernization efforts with accelerated computing and generative AI, contributing to record revenues for NVIDIA.
Gaming revenue for NVIDIA was notably up by 16% year-over-year and 9% sequentially, driven by increased sales of GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs and game console systems on a chip (SOCs). The demand for gaming GPUs was strong in the second quarter, coinciding with the back-to-school season.
NVIDIA’s Blackwell has shown impressive performance in the latest MLPerf Inference v4.1 benchmarks, and Hopper has also seen improvements thanks to ongoing optimizations of the CUDA and AI software stack. Furthermore, NVIDIA posted its highest-ever gaming revenue during Q2 FY2025, reaching $2.880 billion—a rise of 8.8% from the previous quarter and 15.8% from the previous year. This increase was attributed to higher sales of GeForce RTX 40 series and solid demand for desktop cards and laptops during the back-to-school season.
