Nvidia: Blackwell GPU production expected to ramp up in Q4
Demand for the company’s Hopper GPUs remains strong, Nvidia executives said during the company’s fiscal 2025 Q2 earnings call Wednesday
Samples of Nvidia's much-anticipated Blackwell-architecture GPUs are currently shipping to Nvidia partners and customers, according to company executives, with production expected to ramp up in the company's fiscal fourth quarter.
At the same time demand remains strong for Nvidia's Hopper microarchitecture-based GPUs, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress said on a call with financial analysts Wednesday detailing the company's fiscal 2025 second quarter financial results.
"Hopper demand remains strong and the anticipation for Blackwell is incredible," Huang said in a statement accompanying the chip designer's financial results.
For Nvidia's fiscal 2025 second quarter (ended July 28), revenue reached $30.04bn (£22.83bn), up more than 122 per cent from $13.51bn in the second quarter of fiscal 2023. Net income for the latest quarter was $16.60bn (68 cents per share), up more than 168 per cent from $6.19bn one year earlier.
Nvidia's results generally exceeded investor expectations, both for top-line revenue growth and bottom-line earnings. But the company's share price was down in after-hours trading, dropping nearly 7 per cent or almost $9 to $116.95 from Wednesday's $125.61 close.
Reports surfaced in early August that Nvidia was delaying the release of the Blackwell GPUs by three or more months due to technical issues with the processor's underlying architecture. One report said the first Blackwell GPU design would arrive in the fourth quarter instead of the third quarter.
During the earnings call Kress said Nvidia "executed a change to the Blackwell GPU mask to improve production yield."
"Blackwell is widely sampling" to customers and partners, Kress said, and "Blackwell production ramp is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter and continue into fiscal year ‘26."
The CFO added that the company expects to book "several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue" in the fourth quarter. "Demand for Blackwell platforms is well above supply and we expect this to continue into next year," she said.
Later in the call Huang, in response to an analyst's question about the Blackwell changes, said "the change to the [Blackwell] mask is complete" and that "no functional changes" to the design were necessary. He touted the number of system designs incorporating the Blackwell chip that were shown at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, in June.
Kress said shipments of Nvidia's Hopper GPUs "are expected to increase in the second half of fiscal 2025. Hopper supply and availability have improved."
The CFO also touted the demand for Nvidia's RTX computer graphics platform with more than 200 RTX laptop designs and an installed base of 100 million devices. "Every PC with RTX is an AI PC," she said.
Nvidia reported that datacentre revenue in the second quarter was $26.3bn, up 154 per cent from the same quarter one year before.
Nvidia said it expects revenue in its fiscal 2025 third quarter to reach $32.5bn, plus or minus 2 per cent.