AI driven Marvel chip prices rise, Nvidia GB200 orders surge

Due to the surge in demand for AI, Marvell, a major American chip manufacturer, recently announced that its entire product line will increase prices starting from January 1, 2025, taking the lead in the wave of price increases in the optical communications field.

Marvell has benefited from the rising demand for AI related to cloud data centers such as ASIC and silicon photonics. Last quarter's financial report and forecast exceeded market expectations. This price increase also means that the company's performance is expected to continue to grow. Among them, optical communication products such as 800G PAM and 400ZR data center interconnect (DCI) have become important growth engines, driving data center revenue to increase by more than 90% annually.

At the same time, Microsoft's GB200 chip orders surged and Nvidia's production capacity expanded.

According to IT House, Tianfeng International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo released industry chain order information for NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 chips. Microsoft is currently the world's largest GB200 customer. Order volume surged 3-4 times in the fourth quarter of this year, surpassing other orders. The sum of all cloud service providers.

Ming-Chi Kuo said in the report that Blackwell chip production capacity expansion is expected to start at the beginning of the fourth quarter of this year, and shipments in the fourth quarter will be between 150,000 and 200,000 units. It is expected that shipments in the first quarter of 2025 will be significantly It will increase by 200% to 250%, reaching 500,000 to 550,000 yuan.

Microsoft's Blackwell GB200 order volume in the fourth quarter has surged from the previous 300 to 500 cabinets (mainly NVL36) to approximately 1,400 to 1,500 cabinets, of which approximately 70% are NVL72, with a maximum increase of 400%. Subsequent orders will mainly focus on NVL72.

TrendForce: NAND flash memory products welcome price cuts, most notably in the mobile category

According to Kuai Technology, due to the dual impact of increased production and weakening demand, the price of user-side solid-state drives is expected to drop by 5%-10% in the fourth quarter. Although memory manufacturers have more and larger-capacity NAND chips, the AI ​​PC market is not as hot as expected and market demand is weak, resulting in NAND flash memory product prices facing downward revisions.

In the third quarter, consumer SSD prices will increase slightly. However, as price competition intensifies in the fourth quarter, SSD pricing will decline. Enterprise SSDs may experience 0-5% price increases. eMMC/UFS, commonly used in mobile devices, may see the most significant price drops in the fourth quarter, with prices expected to reach up to 13%. This trend is mainly due to slowing growth in the smartphone market, with device manufacturers being cautious in depleting inventory and resisting price increases.