Nvidia $NVDA's Kyber NVL144 rack-scale system has been delayed by more than 12 months to 2028 due to difficulties manufacturing a specialized circuit board, sending shares of Asian technology suppliers tumbling on Monday.
Research firm SemiAnalysis says a manufacturing problem with a key circuit board is pushing the system back more than 12 months
Hector Retamal / Getty Images
Nvidia $NVDA's Kyber NVL144 rack-scale system has been delayed by more than 12 months to 2028 due to difficulties manufacturing a specialized circuit board, sending shares of Asian technology suppliers tumbling on Monday.
Research firm SemiAnalysis said in a post that the PCB midplane at the center of the Kyber design remains too difficult to produce reliably. The Kyber design consolidates 144 of Nvidia's most powerful chips into a single cabinet, enabling them to operate as one unified system, and was originally expected to arrive alongside Vera Rubin Ultra in 2027. Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment.
According to CNBC, an alternative approach that would have paired two existing Nvidia racks to replicate the system's capabilities was also abandoned. Cloud providers pushed back against the design over operational complexity, SemiAnalysis said, leaving Nvidia without a tested path to expand the scale-up architecture for Rubin Ultra.
The news sent PCB-related stocks sharply lower across Asia. Among the hardest-hit names, according to Bloomberg, were Ibiden Co. of Japan, an Nvidia-dependent PCB manufacturer that lost as much as 10% of its value, alongside Hong Kong's Kingboard Laminates Holdings at minus 18%, Taiwan's Elite Material Co. at minus 10%, and South Korea's Samsung Electro-Mechanics at minus 11%.
The selloff came after a significant run-up in those stocks. Before Monday's reversal, both stocks had posted extraordinary gains for the year — Kingboard Laminates by over 470% and Samsung Electro-Mechanics by more than 600%, according to Bloomberg.
The report is "raising uncertainty around Nvidia's next-generation scale-out roadmap and creating a wider competitive window for alternative AI platforms," Shawn Oh, who leads Korea cash equities at NH Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul, told Bloomberg.
SemiAnalysis also warned that NVL576, which would connect eight of the Kyber racks over optical links to form an even larger system, faces its own delays or constraints on production volume.
Nvidia stock was down less than 0.1% in premarket trading Monday.
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