Nvidia (NVDA) has been at the forefront of the AI boom over the past few years. Its place as a bonafide winner has been secured by designing the high-performance chips needed for AI.

That said, the company’s rise to the top also revealed an important truth about the AI boom.

Computational capacity isn’t the only thing AI firms need to prioritize—power delivery and where energy is sourced matters just as much.

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In March 2024, Nvidia (NVDA) unveiled its latest chip: the Blackwell B200. At a launch event— dubbed the “AI Woodstock”—CEO Jensen Huang promised the world that the Blackwell was up to 30 times faster than its predecessor.

Each of these graphics processing units (“GPU”) cost roughly $40,000. They were built as the engine of the next industrial revolution.

Prior chips let AI models generate replies in seconds. Blackwell cut this down to milliseconds. For the biggest players in AI, getting access to this advanced chip[ was a necessity.

However, Nvidia’s quest to get these chips to market had its fair share of hiccups along the way.

In August that year, Nvidia admitted to a design flaw in the Blackwell. That forced a multi-month delay. 

The chip’s new two-part design was more efficient, but also more fragile. It couldn’t handle the high temperatures generated during use. The chips warped and broke in the heat.

After solving this issue, Nvidia began sending its first Blackwell GPUs to data centers like Microsoft’s flagship facility in Phoenix, Arizona. Unfortunately, that’s where a new and far more expensive flaw was revealed.

The setback wasn’t due to any faults in the Blackwell itself. It came from the “plumbing” that powered it.

A single Blackwell chip requires roughly 1,200 watts to achieve its world-record processing speeds. However, this power needs to be delivered delicately. 

If energy is delivered at too high of a voltage, the GPU disintegrates. Instead, GPUs are fed very low voltages around 0.8 volts for Blackwell chips. For reference, that’s about half of what an AA battery generates.

But the electricity is flowing at a staggering rate—1,500 amps of current. For context, a home typically handles around 200 amps. And that’s through thousands of square feet.

So the power flows 7.5 times faster than energy through a house, but it’s going through something thousands of times smaller.

Nvidia had to find a way to push 1,500 amps through a device the size of a postage stamp.

So Nvidia hired Monolithic Power Systems (MPWR) to resolve this power delivery problem.

The company specializes in voltage regulator modules. These devices act like transformers that regulate power going into your home. They convert large flows of energy into lower-voltage currents that are safe for chips to handle.

Monolithic was the leading module provider for Nvidia’s prior GPU, the Hopper H100. And at $50 per unit, it was a cheaper choice for Nvidia than some competitors.

Despite their low cost, these components were the only thing standing between 1,500 amps of raw energy and the most expensive silicon on Earth. If they failed, the energy wouldn’t fuel the chip and destroy it instead.

During this process, both companies quickly learned that Blackwells were more difficult to maintain than Hoppers.

Blackwell GPUs needed nearly twice as many amps as Hoppers did. And that means they produced nearly four times as much heat. Monolithic’s regulators couldn’t keep up.

By November 2024, reports confirmed that the gatekeepers were failing. At the high-wattage levels Blackwell required, Monolithic’s components burnt out, rendering entire 72-chip racks inoperable.

Nvidia effectively fired Monolithic Power Systems for its top-tier Blackwell models as a result. The company canceled Monolithic’s backlog and pivoted to competitors to save the launch.

On November 11, 2024, MPWR stock plummeted 15%, wiping out $10 billion in market value.

For Nvidia’s customers, the situation was just as dire. Microsoft’s Phoenix data center, which was designed to hold 50,000 Blackwell chips, sat partially empty. OpenAI reportedly became so concerned by the overheating “toasters” that it asked Microsoft for older, slower chips just to keep its AI training on schedule.

Nvidia eventually resolved the crisis by redesigning the racks to include specialized liquid cooling.

The incident brought an important reality to the forefront of the AI industry: A GPU is only as good as a company’s ability to power it safely.

Computing capacity gets the headlines, but power delivery is becoming just as critical to the AI buildout.

As chips get faster, they also get more demanding. Blackwell needed nearly double the power of its predecessor. The next generation of chips will likely need even more.

That puts pressure on the companies that convert and regulate that power. Miss the mark, and a $40,000 chip is worthless.

Going forward, the winners in the AI trade won’t just be the chip designers and makers, the list will also include the companies that can keep those chips running.

Best regards,

Joel Litman & Rob Spivey
Chief Investment Officer &
Director of Research
at Valens Research