Top Developers Want Nvidia Blackwell Chips. Everyone Else, Not So Much

Jensen Huang turned Nvidia into the third most valuable company in the world by designing chips that were way ahead of their time. But Huang’s remarks on Tuesday suggest he’s pulling far ahead of some customers, and the growing gap between what he’s selling and what they’re buying could spell trouble.

In his keynote speech at the GTC developer conference, Huang talked about Rubin, Nvidia’s latest server chip for artificial intelligence that’s due out next year. It’s supposed to be twice as powerful as the Blackwell AI chips that are only now trickling into his biggest customers’ data centers. Some cloud providers only got their first Blackwell shipment over the weekend, one knowledgeable GTC attendee told me. 

As a result, the Nvidia customers I spoke to said they had a hard time getting overly excited about Rubin. I get it: Hearing about the next graphics processing unit before the current one is fully operational probably makes customers feel anxious, reminding them of all the work that lies ahead.