But as one analyst told me, if there is indeed a delay in shipping product, and if the delay could materially affect earnings, Nvidia will have to disclose it.
Because Nvidia favors the hyperscalers that drop billions of dollars at a time on their orders, those customers will be the ones most likely to feel the pinch. Enterprise adoption goes at a slower pace, and they’re likely just now beginning to deploy Hopper-based systems. So if you have an order for some Hopper-based systems, you don’t need to worry too much.
Earlier this year, Nvidia announced it would introduce a new microarchitecture every year instead of every two years, as it had been doing. At the time, I felt that this was full of risk and could potentially blow up in Nvidia’s face because it left no room for error. It would require flawless execution, and nobody’s perfect, not even Nvidia.
And now it seems it has happened. One frustrating part for Nvidia is that this problem is outside of its control. It’s a manufacturing issue with TSMC. Yes, the two companies work together on the packaging of the product, but the primary responsibility lies with TSMC.
This should give AMD pause, because it, too, has announced plans to have new GPU architecture every year for its increasingly popular Instinct line. If anyone knows the consequences of a misstep, it’s AMD. It was cruising along just fine in 2006 with a strongly competitive product against Intel before the Barcelona disaster – a new architecture that tried to do too much at once and ended up shipping late and underperforming. AMD lost all of its momentum and spent the next decade wandering the wilderness getting trounced by Intel before the Zen resurgence. AMD doesn’t need that again.
