Nvidia is well known for its high-performance gaming GPUs and industry-leading
AI GPUs. However, the trillion-dollar GPU manufacturer is also known for controlling how its GPUs are used beyond company walls. For example, it can be quite restrictive with its AIB partners' graphics card designs. Perhaps not surprisingly, this level of control also appears to extend beyond card partners over to AI customers, including
Microsoft.
The Information reports that there was a standoff between Microsoft and Nvidia over how Nvidia's new
Blackwell B200 GPUs were to be installed in Microsoft's server rooms.
Nvidia has been aggressively pursuing ever larger pieces of the data center pie, which is immediately clear if you look at how it announced the Blackwell B200 parts. Multiple times during the presentation, Jensen Huang indicated that he doesn't think about individual GPUs any more — he thinks of the entire NVL72 rack as a GPU. It's a rather transparent effort to gain additional revenue from its AI offerings, and that extends to influencing how customers install their new B200 GPUs.
Previously, the customer was responsible for buying and building appropriate server racks to house the hardware. Now, Nvidia is pushing customers to buy individual racks and even entire SuperPods — all coming direct from Nvidia. Nvidia claims this will boost GPU performance, and there's merit to such talk considering all the interlinks between the various GPUs, servers, racks, and even SuperPods. But there's also a lot of dollar bills changing hands when you're building data centers at scale.
Nvidia's smaller customers might be ok with the company's offerings, but Microsoft wasn't. VP of Nvidia Andrew Bell reportedly asked Microsoft to buy a server rack design specifically for its new B200 GPUs that boasted a form factor a few inches different from Microsoft's existing server racks that are actively used in its data centers.
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