Nvidia’s Kyber Rack Delayed to 2028 After PCB Issue

A research firm reported Nvidia’s Kyber NVL144 rack-scale system has been pushed to 2028 after manufacturers struggled to produce a multi-layer printed circuit board midplane. The update also said the NVL72x2 back-to-back rack design has been cancelled.

The update arrived roughly three months after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated Kyber at the company’s GTC conference. The PCB midplane is a specialized multi-layer board that links electronic modules inside the cabinet and was identified as the primary manufacturing challenge.

Kyber is designed as a rack-scale cabinet that would house 144 of Nvidia’s most advanced chips in vertically mounted compute trays so the processors operate together as a single platform. The layout aims to increase computing density and reduce latency compared with horizontal GPU racks. Kyber had been expected to debut with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin Ultra platform in 2027.

The cancelled NVL72x2 would have combined two current-generation racks back-to-back to approximate Kyber’s performance. Major cloud providers and hyperscalers pushed back on the design over its unconventional layout and operational burden, prompting cancellation.

The research firm also warned that NVL576, a larger system intended to link eight racks with optical interconnects, may face delays or be produced only in limited quantities.

The report suggested the absence of a clear scale-up path for Rubin Ultra could create openings for competitors, noting AMD and Google have already secured business with their own AI chips.

The firm said Nvidia’s current-generation Rubin systems are in full production and scheduled to begin shipping this fall to eight cloud partners, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It projected Nvidia’s data-center compute revenue in the second half of fiscal 2027 to exceed analyst consensus by about 20%.

Nvidia shares were little changed in premarket trading, up about 0.2% at the time of the update.