Nate’s Notebook 11: Blackwell Chips in 2025

Source: Nate’s Newsletter Date: 2024-10-18 URL: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/nates-notebook-11-blackwell-chips-e2e

Summary

Nvidia’s Blackwell chips are ramping into production in Q4 2024 with demand that outpaces Hopper — analyst projections point to significant revenue acceleration by early 2025, despite initial production delays. DOJ antitrust scrutiny runs alongside the demand surge.

Implications

Vendor positioning thread. Nvidia’s hardware dominance creates an asymmetric constraint on the entire AI stack — every lab’s training and inference timeline is downstream of Nvidia’s production ramp. If Blackwell delays persist, competitive capability timelines slip for everyone except labs with alternative silicon (Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s Trainium).

AI economics thread. Unprecedented demand for AI systems against a supply-constrained hardware layer is an inflationary signal for compute costs. If inference economics stay expensive through the Blackwell ramp, the “AI will become cheap and ubiquitous” assumption embedded in most AI product roadmaps needs revision.

Watch: Whether Blackwell’s production ramp hits analyst projections in Q1 2025, and whether DOJ antitrust pressure produces any structural change in Nvidia’s market position.