Meta Platforms, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, does not expect to receive shipments of Nvidia’s new “Blackwell” AI chip this year, a company spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday.
The news comes just a day after Nvidia unveiled a more powerful and faster next-generation successor to its H100 AI chip — the B200, at its annual developer conference. The new chip is what is known as a graphics processing unit (GPU) and is what powers language models used in AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“We’re looking forward to using Nvidia’s Blackwell to help train our open-source Llama models and build the next generation of Meta AI and consumer products,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement on Monday.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta is one of Nvidia’s biggest customers
Earlier this year, the social media giant announced plans to grow its stockpile of older Nvidia chips.
In January, Zuckerberg said in a post on the company’s X-competitor, Threads, that Meta plans to have about 350,000 H100 chips by the end of this year. The figure is striking when you consider each chip carries a price tag of $40,000.
Last week, Meta announced that it’s training its AI models on two GPU clusters consisting of about 24,000 H100 chips each.
Blackwell will usher in the next-generation of AI
Nvidia stock rose 2% on Tuesday after Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress told investors that its new B200 chips will hit the market later this year.
In addition, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC the Blackwell chip would be priced between $30,000 and $40,000.
The Blackwell is made up of 208 billion transistors and will be 2.5 times faster at training AI than its predecessor and five times faster at inference, the process AI models use to make conclusions.