How Dell, Lenovo and Supermicro are Adapting to NVIDIA's Fast AI Chip Transitions

by Dylan Martin, CRN

Lenovo executive Vlad Rozanovich thinks the annual cadence of NVIDIA's AI chip and platform releases is a "beautiful thing" because of how the quick transitions will allow data centers to boost rack-level AI performance by several magnitudes every year.

But to service the tech industry's computation needs that NVIDIA founder, President and CEO Jensen Huang said are expected to grow substantially due to the rise of AI reasoning models, OEMs like Lenovo, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Supermicro must move faster than ever before to ensure they can release competitive products based on NVIDIA's fast-growing portfolio of AI computing platforms.

And with multiple generations of NVIDIA platforms for customers to choose from, OEMs must also do their best to order the correct mix of platforms—which now include Hopper products from the past two years, the recently launched Blackwell products and Blackwell Ultra-based offerings coming later this year—to ensure they can fulfill demand without building up too much excess inventory.

"When you look at a traditional enterprise-type of engagement, Lenovo has always been known for the quality of our servers, and in the past, we've always had to do nearly a year of testing before we introduce a new product," Rozanovich, senior vice president of Lenovo's Infrastructure Solutions Group, told CRN at NVIDIA's GTC 2025 event last month.

"And with the cycle times that NVIDIA is putting out there, it puts a lot of pressure on us. We always have to keep thinking 12 months ahead," he added.

The challenge of managing NVIDIA's fast AI chip transitions was underlined less than two weeks before NVIDIA at GTC unveiled Blackwell Ultra and the succeeding AI computing platforms to come in 2026 and 2027. This is when HPE said it suffered from lower server margins in part because of higher-than-normal AI server inventory caused by the rapid transition to Blackwell from NVIDIA's Hopper generation.

"What that means is when you look at the segmentation of AI, you have service providers and model builders that lead with time to market with the latest technologies [such as Blackwell]," HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri told CRN in early March. "In [the first quarter], we booked $1.6 billion of new AI orders, which was up double digits year over year, and we doubled the order bookings sequentially. But 17 percent of that was Blackwell."

Neil Anderson, vice president and CTO of cloud, infrastructure and AI solutions at solution provider powerhouse World Wide Technology, told CRN that NVIDIA's fast AI chip transitions represent a big change in the way data center buying cycles have traditionally worked.

"The typical life cycle in the IT industry—if you look at [general-purpose] compute servers [and] networks—it's been seven, eight [years]. Some customers have 10-year-old technology in their data center, and it's running just fine," said Anderson, whose St. Louis-based company ranked No. 7 in CRN's 2024 Solution Provider 500 list.