NEW YORK, March 19 (Reuters) - Facebook owner Meta

Platforms ( META ) is not expecting to receive shipments of

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) new flagship artificial intelligence chip this

year, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

Nvidia ( NVDA ), the dominant designer of GPU (graphics processing

unit) chips needed to power most cutting-edge artificial

intelligence work, announced the new B200 "Blackwell" chip at

its annual developer conference on Monday.

The chip maker said the B200 is 30 times speedier at tasks

like serving up answers from chatbots, although it did not give

specific details about how well it performs when chewing through

huge amounts data to train those chatbots, which is the kind of

work that has powered most of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) soaring sales.

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress told

financial analysts on Tuesday that "we think we're going to come

to market later this year," but also said that shipment volume

for the new GPUs would not ramp up until 2025.

Social media giant Meta is one of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) biggest

customers, after buying hundreds of thousands of its previous

generation of chips to support pushes into amped-up content

recommendations systems and generative AI products.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed in January that the

company planned to have about 350,000 of those earlier chips,

called H100s, in its stockpile by the end of the year. In

combination with other GPUs, he added, Meta would have the

equivalent of about 600,000 H100s by then.

In a statement on Monday, Zuckerberg said Meta planned to

use Blackwell to train the company's Llama models. The company

is currently training a third generation of the model on two GPU

clusters it announced last week, which it said each contain

around 24,000 H100 GPUs.

Meta planned to continue using those clusters to train Llama

3 and would use Blackwell for future generations of the model,

the Meta spokesperson said.