Nvidia's Rare Stumble: Flagship Product Delayed by a Year, AMD and Google See a Window of Opportunity
- Core Thesis: Nvidia's Rubin Ultra-based Kyber NVL144 rack is delayed by over 12 months to 2028 due to extreme manufacturing difficulties with its core component, the PCB midplane. Its interim solution, the NVL72x2, has also been canceled after customer opposition. Concurrently, the NVL576 system faces its own CPO technical challenges, creating a temporary gap in Nvidia's scaling roadmap and presenting opportunities for competitors.
- Key Factors:
- The direct cause of the Kyber NVL144 delay is the manufacturing difficulty of the PCB midplane (orthogonal backplane), which uses a hybrid material of 78-layer M9-grade copper-clad laminate, quartz cloth, and PTFE, with trace width/spacing ≤ 25μm to achieve 448G+ SerDes rates.
- Nvidia's interim NVL72x2 solution was canceled due to opposition from cloud service providers and hyperscale data center operators who objected to its "unusual design and heavy operational burden," leaving both potential routes blocked.
- The NVL576 system connects 8 Oberon racks via CPO, but CPO currently faces challenges. SemiAnalysis suggests its launch may be delayed or limited to small shipments, raising doubts about its mass-production maturity.
- The 4-compute-die version of the Rubin Ultra has been canceled, leaving only the 2-die version, significantly lowering the theoretical compute ceiling per rack. Nvidia plans to compensate by selling more racks to fill the gap.
- Nvidia currently lacks a proven solution for scaling at the Rubin Ultra level, providing a window of opportunity for competitors like AMD's MI500X and Google's TPUv8i "Broadfly" to surpass it in scaling capabilities.
Original Title: "SemiAnalysis Reveals Pre-Market News: Nvidia's Kyber NVL144 Rack Delayed Over 12 Months Due to 'PCB Midplane Manufacturing Difficulties'"
Original Author: Long Yue
Original Source: Wall Street News
On the morning of July 6th, semiconductor industry research firm SemiAnalysis published a thread of six consecutive tweets on platform X (formerly Twitter), disclosing significant delays and multiple cancellations concerning Nvidia's Kyber NVL144 rack architecture. The news sparked market attention before the opening bell.
SemiAnalysis stated bluntly: "Major delay: Just three months after Jensen Huang showcased the Kyber NVL144 at GTC, the product has hit a major setback, delayed by over 12 months to 2028."
The PCB Midplane: The Board Holding Up Kyber
SemiAnalysis analyzes that the direct cause of the Kyber NVL144 delay points to a critical hardware component—the PCB Midplane, also referred to by Nvidia officially as the "Orthogonal Backplane".
The institution stated: "The Kyber NVL144 rack architecture has been delayed to 2028 because the PCB midplane still faces significant manufacturing challenges. The NVL576, which connects 8x Oberon racks via CPO between NVSwitches, is also likely to be delayed or limited to low-volume production due to current CPO challenges."
The grey board that Jensen Huang showcased at the GTC conference in March is precisely the orthogonal backplane of the Rubin Ultra (Kyber architecture) cabinet. Its function is to achieve a 90° vertical interconnection between the compute trays and the switch trays—compute trays are inserted vertically, connecting directly board-to-board with the rear switch trays through this midplane, completely eliminating the traditional cable clutter.
The manufacturing difficulty of this board is extremely high. According to the aforementioned technical analysis, the backplane uses M9-grade copper-clad laminate + Quartz fabric (Q-fabric) + PTFE hybrid materials, with a layer count of 78 (formed by laminating three 26-layer boards), and line width/line spacing is ≤25μm to meet ultra-high-speed signal integrity requirements at 448G+ SerDes rates.
Why is this board absolutely necessary? According to technical analysis, the Rubin Ultra NVL144 rack needs to connect 144 GPUs within a single domain. If the copper cable solution were used, it would require over 20,000 cables, increasing weight by more than 30% and causing severe signal attenuation. The orthogonal backplane is one of the few viable solutions under current technological conditions.
Alternative NVL72x2 Plan Also Canceled
Faced with the manufacturing difficulties of Kyber, Nvidia attempted to develop a transitional solution—the NVL72x2 back-to-back rack architecture.
According to SemiAnalysis, the design concept of this plan was to place two Oberon racks back-to-back, expanding the scale domain through pure copper NVLink, thereby bypassing the manufacturing challenges of the Kyber midplane.
However, this plan ultimately failed to materialize. SemiAnalysis stated that the NVL72x2 "was canceled due to strong opposition from cloud service providers and hyperscale data center operators over its unconventional design and heavy operational burden."
With both paths blocked, Nvidia faces a temporary gap in scaling the Rubin Ultra.
NVL576 Also Under Pressure; CPO Challenge Cannot Be Ignored
The delay isn't limited to the Kyber NVL144. SemiAnalysis also pointed out that the NVL576—a larger-scale system connecting 8 Oberon racks via CPO (Co-Packaged Optics)—"given the current challenges with CPO, may also be delayed or limited to low-volume shipments."
CPO is the optical interconnect technology Nvidia is introducing for the first time for scaling networks in the Rubin Ultra phase. According to a previous research report published by SemiAnalysis in March 2026, the design for NVL576 was: maintaining copper cable expansion within the rack, and connecting NVSwitches between racks via CPO, forming a two-tier fully interconnected network.
However, the production maturity of CPO itself remains a variable. In its research report, SemiAnalysis explicitly stated that CPO NVSwitch would not be formally ready until the Feynman generation.
Rubin Ultra Itself Shrinks: 4-Chip Version Canceled
Coinciding with the above delay news, another significant product-level change was disclosed.
SemiAnalysis stated that the 4-compute-chip version of Rubin Ultra has been canceled, "only keeping the smaller 2-compute-chip version of Rubin Ultra, which effectively has about half the performance of the 4-chip version."
This means that even if the Kyber rack ships on schedule, the compute ceiling per rack has been significantly lowered.
In response, SemiAnalysis indicated that Nvidia will compensate for this shortfall by "significantly increasing sales of Oberon Rubin racks and Oberon Rubin Ultra racks."
Competitive Window: AMD and Google Could Benefit
The gap in the scale domain directly impacts Nvidia's competitive position in large-scale training scenarios.
SemiAnalysis pointed out: "Nvidia currently has no proven solution to scale the scale domain of Rubin Ultra, leaving room for competitors like AMD MI500X or TPUv8i Broadfly to potentially surpass Rubin Ultra in scaling capabilities."
According to Nvidia's current roadmap, CPO NVSwitch will not appear until the next-generation Feynman platform. Until then, the scaling ceiling for Rubin Ultra is constrained.
At the end of the tweet thread, SemiAnalysis noted that the aforementioned delays and cancellations have implications for the memory, PCB, and ODM supply chains.
The manufacturing challenges of the Kyber midplane directly point to technological bottlenecks faced by high-end PCB suppliers. The 78-layer ultra-high-density PCB, M9-grade copper-clad laminate, and PTFE hybrid materials required for this midplane represent the current limits of PCB manufacturing technology.
