After delays, Nvidia’s Blackwell chips are finally shipping to customers, but the roll-out hasn’t been completely smooth, as there were recent reports that Nvidia’s and TSMC’s relationship might be showing signs of stress over some Blackwell chip failures. Now, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has clarified that there aren’t any tensions between the two companies and the problem was “100% Nvidia’s fault”.
As reported by Reuters, Huang admits a Blackwell design flaw but lays blame entirely at its own feet. He says “a design flaw with its latest Blackwell AI chips which impacted production has been fixed with the help of longtime Taiwanese manufacturing partner TSMC.”
According to Huang, Blackwell was “functional, but the design flaw caused the yield to be low. It was 100% Nvidia’s fault.” And in fact, far from hindering Blackwell’s roll-out, “what TSMC did, was to help us recover from that yield difficulty and resume the manufacturing of Blackwell at an incredible pace.”
So much for the blame game supposedly occurring between the AI and chip giants, then—reports of tensions between the two companies Huang reportedly called “fake news”. And so much for Nvidia eyeing up Samsung for its chip production—a claim we were rightly very sceptical about. Whatever the original sources were for the initial reports, they appear to have been wrong. All seems rosy in the land of Team Green—well, besides the still somewhat slowed Blackwell release.
Reuters also reports that Nvidia’s shares “fell around 2% in early trading”, perhaps hinting that this was related to the “fake news”. Big picture-wise, though, Nvidia’s going from strength to strength and a 2% drop in early trading will matter little. The company’s still the hottest thing in the burgeoning AI market, and if the non-fatal Blackwell flaw is now completely fixed as Huang says, there’s little to worry about.
Which is especially beneficial given Blackwell chips have already started shipping and are already lining some server racks. Yes, there’s been a little delay, but now it seems like Blackwell—which Nvidia thinks could be the “most successful product” in its history—is ready to churn through the next wave of cloud and AI server workloads.
Of course, as PC gamers, we’re also excited for what Blackwell might bring in the form of RTX 50-series graphics cards. These are sure to be some of the best graphics cards for gaming upon release, and we’re expecting them to launch in early 2025. Combine this with general signs of a booming GPU market, and there might be a lot for us to look forward to.
