Nvidia confirms that the first demo samples of the Blackwell GPU are ready for delivery. This brings the commercial launch one step closer.

Jensen Huang was the guest of honor at the Siggraph conference in Denver and had some good news to share about the Blackwell GPUs. The first test samples will be shipped worldwide this week, Huang said. It is common practice for OEMs to be given beta samples before a chip architecture is commercially released. This gives them time to conduct compatibility testing before the chip is released on a wider scale.

AI Bomb

Huang’s announcement brings the launch of Blackwell one step closer. Blackwell is the next GPU architecture expected by the end of the year. Expectations are high: the announcement in March was full of superlatives.

The B100 can deliver up to 700 watts, the B200 has a peak consumption of up to 1200 watts. Blackwell GPUs will be much more powerful and efficient than the current Hopper chips, which are also no problem.

Demand exceeds supply

Demand for Blackwell GPUs already exceeds the supply that Nvidia can deliver. Meta announced this morning that it will probably need ten times the computing power to train its next AI models. Mark Zuckerberg was allowed to go on stage with Jensen Huang to make the friendship between the two companies public.

Nvidia better buy a bigger coffer, because it will ring loudly when Blackwell becomes available. A single Blackwell GPU can cost up to forty thousand dollars.

Blackwell may sound impressive, but it’s far from the end point for Nvidia. After Blackwell, Rubin will take over in 2026. Nvidia currently switches to a new GPU architecture every two years, but Huang wants to enable an annual rhythm at some point.