Nvidia’s Kyber rack system delayed to 2028 over manufacturing snags

Nvidia‘s next marquee product — the Kyber rack-scale architecture designed to house its 2027 Rubin Ultra chips — has been delayed by more than 12 months to 2028, according to research firm SemiAnalysis, the latest in a string of reported setbacks raising questions about the AI giant’s product roadmap.

Kyber is a server cabinet that packs 144 of Nvidia’s most powerful chips into a single unit so they can work together as one giant computer, providing the horsepower AI companies need to train and run their most advanced models.

The design mounts graphics processing units in compute trays that sit vertically instead of horizontally to boost density and reduce latency, and had been slated to debut with Vera Rubin Ultra, Nvidia’s next-generation rack-scale system, in 2027.

The setback stems from difficulties manufacturing a key circuit board at the heart of the system, SemiAnalysis said in a post on Monday.

“Kyber NVL144 rack architecture has been delayed to 2028 as the PCB midplane remains challenging from a manufacturability standpoint,” the firm said, referring to a specialized, multi-layer printed circuit board that connects electronic modules within a system.

NVL576 — a larger system linking eight racks via optical connections — is also likely delayed or limited to small volumes, the research firm said.

The reported delay adds to mounting strains across Nvidia’s product lines, underscoring concerns that Nvidia’s breakneck annual release cadence is colliding with manufacturing limits.

A backup plan — bolting two of Nvidia’s current-generation racks together for similar power — has also been scrapped after cloud customers rejected the design as awkward and costly to operate. “It has since been cancelled due to heavy pushback from CSPs [cloud service providers] and hyperscalers over its odd design and heavy operational burden,” SemiAnalysis said.

That leaves Nvidia with “no proven solution to expand the scale-up world size for Rubin Ultra,” SemiAnalysis said, predicting that could give rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Google, whose in-house chips are already winning business from top AI labs, a rare technical opening at the high end of the market.

Nvidia rejected the SemiAnalysis report and said, “Our roadmap is intact.”

The delays “should not be over analyzed as affecting the long-term criticality of Nvidia to AI data infrastructure buildouts,” said Paul Triolo, a partner at consultancy DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, noting the company “has faced these kinds of challenges before, and has worked with vendors to overcome technical issues.”

With power supply likely to remain the major constraint on American AI data center spending, Triolo said, “delays in getting to more advanced systems could just mean that the new systems are ready by the time the U.S. can work to overcome some of the critical bottlenecks on power now dogging the industry.”

Nvidia’s current-generation Rubin systems are in full production and begin shipping this fall to eight cloud partners, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. SemiAnalysis also projects Nvidia’s data-center compute revenue will run 20% above Wall Street consensus in the second half of fiscal 2027.

While Huawei and other domestic manufacturers “will potentially gain some time,” China’s hardware ecosystem is increasingly diverging from — rather than chasing — the Nvidia-led model, Triolo said. “The issue is no longer really catching up, but how good will China’s alternative AI stack be by 2030,” he said.