NVIDIA’s Blackwell GB200 AI servers are anticipated to see major traction, reaching 2 million units shipped in 2025 & utilizing new packaging tech.
NVIDIA To Overcome CoWoS Supply Chain Bottlenecks By Shifting To The Newer “PFLO” Standard, 420K Units Shipping This Year With Up To 2 Million Anticipated For 2025
The success of NVIDIA’s Hopper AI products last year not only uplifted the company’s economics to new heights but also revealed massive flaws in the supply chain. Due to these flaws, the products became victims of long order backlogs. The main culprits at that time were HBM & CoWoS supply, which was in a much inferior position to what it is today. Despite seeing massive upgrades, NVIDIA has decided to resolve CoWoS issues with its latest Blackwell product, as the firm is rumored to have switched to a newer packaging technology by 2025-2026.
Taiwan Economic Daily reports that NVIDIA’s GB200 AI systems will come with “panel-level fan-out packaging,” which is said to be a superior alternative to the traditional CoWoS. Team Green plans this move to be executed sometime in late 2025 or 2026.
Still, the company has actually adopted panel-level fan-out ahead of schedule since NVIDIA expects massive demand for its Blackwell products, and relying on just CoWoS wouldn’t be a wise move for the firm.
PFLO (Panel Level Fan Out) relies on the integration of multiple individual ICs on separate silicon wafers. Instead of silicon as the carrier, PFLO uses materials like laminate or glass. Several other technologies, such as Redistribution Layer (RDL) Formation, are also utilized, but we won’t go into detail. We don’t have any figures or data to compare PFLO with CoWoS for now, but integrating the standard with Blackwell products means that PFLO is either on par or ahead in terms of performance and scalability.
It is said that suppliers of the new packaging standard are limited for now, with Taiwan’s Powertech and Innolux in the race to win Team Green’s orders. Apart from that, NVIDIA expects to ship out 420,000 Blackwell GB200 units in the second half of 2024, and the production figures for next year are expected to be somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million, which shows how big of an upgrade the Blackwell generation will bring in terms of production and ultimately revenue as well.
Do remember that the GPU is going to cost around $35K-$45K per piece with servers costing up to $3 million so that’s big money pouring into NVIDIA’s revenue stream in the coming year as demand explodes. Dell is expected to roll out servers equipped with up to 8 B200 Blackwell AI GPUs & also add liquid cooling to the mix which is going to be a popular solution for these up to 1200W GPU monsters.