Meta places orders for Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs with deliveries expected in H2 2024.

NVIDIA's Blackwell B200 AI GPU has emerged as a major focus following the company's successful GTC conference. Meta has placed initial orders for the B200, becoming the first major technology company to order NVIDIA's latest flagship AI accelerator. According to Reuters, NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress stated that "we think we're going to come to market later this year," though volume shipments are expected to ramp into 2025 as the company enters markets with its Blackwell products.

Meta's position as an early adopter reflects its status as what the article characterizes as an "iron partner" for NVIDIA in artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company has reportedly accumulated 600,000 units of H100s by the end of this year and now plans to leverage the Blackwell platform for training its "Llama" LLM model, potentially gaining significant computational advantage over competitors.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the scale of the opportunity ahead, noting that the global data center market represents a $1 trillion installed base generating $250 billion in annual revenue. Huang stated: "The volume ramp in demand happened fairly sharply last time, but this time, we've had plenty of visibility" of demand. He added that NVIDIA's percentage of that $250 billion annual opportunity "will likely be higher than the past" because the company sells accelerated computing platforms at data center scale rather than individual chips. To manage scaling, Huang is working with TSMC to avoid bottlenecks in chip packaging similar to those experienced with the H100.

The Blackwell B200 incorporates 160 SMs for 20,480 cores and features the latest NVLINK interconnect technology, supporting an 8 GPU architecture and 400 GbE networking switch. With Meta's early orders now in place, the transition to next-generation markets appears underway, positioning NVIDIA to maintain its market dominance.