[Hardware]Analysts halve Nvidia Blackwell cabinet shipment forecasts for 2025 — prediction contrasts AI boom

[Maheso]

Unnamed industry analysts quoted by DigiTimes have cut their 2025 forecasts for Nvidia GB200-based NVL72 machines by over 50%, which contradicts almost all shipment projections for AI hardware this year. One important catch is that the analysts slashed sales forecasts only for machines based on Nvidia's Arm processors. Sales of x86-based machines with B200 GPUs for AI and HPC will likely thrive.

The 2025 shipment forecast for GB200 NVL72 cabinets has been lowered from 50,000 – 80,000 to 25,000 – 35,000 units. High-volume shipments will begin in the second quarter and ramp up throughout the year. While the 56% slash looks rather dramatic, it should be noted that 35,000 cabinets with 72 GPUs per cabinet means 2.52 million GPUs will be shipped, which is impressive. Also, these are only Grace Blackwell machines featuring Nvidia's Armv9-based processors. There will also be Blackwell-accelerated systems running x86 processors.

The reasons the analysts halved their forecasts concerning Arm-based GB200 NVL72 cabinet shipments are unknown.

Their industry checks may have revealed that the general interest in Arm-based machines for AI training and inference was overestimated. Or perhaps some companies decided to stick with the good old x86 to not rewrite their software for the Armv9 instruction set architecture.

Perhaps some customers decided not to use NVL72 cabinets due to their power and cooling requirements and switched to less dense cabinets.

It is also possible that some companies decided to slow down procurements of GB200 machines in light of rumors that Nvidia will roll out 50% more powerful GB300 and B300 GPUs six months after the 200-series Blackwell products ship. Of course, the ramp-up of GB300 and B300 products will also take time, so it is unlikely that the Blackwell Refresh cannibalized sales of the original Blackwell designs this dramatically.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/analysts-halve-nvidia-gb200-blackwell-shipment-forecasts-for-2025-prediction-contrasts-ai-boom