(Reuters) -Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday that orders for some 3.6 million of its flagship “Blackwell” chips from four top cloud service providers “under represented” demand, since they did not include orders from key customer Meta.
Facebook-owner Meta Platforms is among the largest buyers of Nvidia chips and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the social media giant, said early last year the company planned to use Blackwell chips to train the company’s open-source large language Llama models.
During a question-and-answer session with financial analysts at the company’s annual software developer conference in San Jose, California, Huang said the 3.6 million orders excluded internet service providers such as social media platform X, Meta, smaller cloud providers and startups.
Meta has said it expects to spend up to $65 billion in AI infrastructure this year, a large chunk of which is expected to go toward Nvidia chips, mirroring similar commitments from other big tech giants as they race to develop the best AI products.
Huang has been trying to allay investor concerns surrounding demand for the pricey AI chips that have made Nvidia one of the world’s most valuable firms, after China’s DeepSeek made a competitive chatbot with allegedly fewer AI chips.
“The good news is that the understanding of R1 was completely wrong,” Huang said on Wednesday, referring to DeepSeek’s AI model.
DeepSeek’s focus on reasoning – the ability of an AI system to make inferences – will increase the need for computation, helping drive demand for Nvidia chips, Huang said.
Nvidia’s shares were up close to 2% after the analyst call. They fell 3.4% on Tuesday, when investors were unconvinced by Huang’s pitch that the company was well positioned to respond to a pivot in the AI market as businesses shift from training AI models to getting detailed answers from them.
ONSHORING PRODUCTION
In response to an analyst’s questions on the impact of higher tariffs under U.S. President Donald Trump, Huang said Nvidia sees little short-term impact but would move production to the United States in the longer term.
He gave no timeline.
TSMC , the world’s biggest contract maker of chips, has said it plans to make a fresh $100 billion investment in the U.S. that involves building five additional chip facilities.
“We’re in it,” Huang said, referring to TSMC’s new chip fabrication facility in Arizona. “We are now running production silicon in Arizona.”
Reuters reported in December that TSMC was in discussions with Nvidia to produce its Blackwell chips at the company’s new plant in Arizona.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Jose, California and Arsheeya Bajwa and Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva, Sayantani Ghosh and Pooja Desai)
