NVIDIA’S Blackwell AI Chips are Overheating
NVIDIA’s new Blackwell AI chips, which have already faced delays, have encountered problems with accompanying servers that overheat, causing some customers to worry they will not have enough time to get new data centres up and running, the Information reported on Sunday.
The Blackwell graphics processing units overheat when connected together in server racks designed to hold up to 72 chips, the report said, citing sources familiar with the issue.
The chipmaker has asked its suppliers to change the design of the racks several times to resolve overheating problems, according to NVIDIA employees who have been working on the issue, as well as customers and suppliers with knowledge of the issue, the report said without naming the suppliers.
“NVIDIA is working with leading cloud service providers as an integral part of our engineering team and process. The engineering iterations are normal and expected,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters.
In March, NVIDIA unveiled Blackwell chips and had earlier said they would ship in the second quarter before encountering delays, potentially affecting customers such as Meta Platforms, Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft.
NVIDIA’s Blackwell chip takes two squares of silicon the size of the company’s previous offering and binds them into a single component that is 30 times speedier at tasks like providing responses from chatbots.
