Super Micro Computer Inc. saw its stock tumble 15% in after-hours trading Tuesday, after pre-announcing a big March-quarter shortfall - and the transition to new Nvidia Corp. chips could be the reason why.

Super Micro $(SMCI)$ blamed "delayed customer platform decisions" as it warned that results for its latest quarter will be much lower than expected. It also cited much lower-than-anticipated earnings per share, due to higher inventory reserves, resulting from older-generation products.

The San Jose-based server maker said it now expects $4.5 billion to $4.6 billion in revenue for the March quarter, below the $5.0 billion to $6.0 billion that it previously forecast. Additionally, Super Micro expects 29 cents to 31 cents in adjusted earnings per share for the period, below the 42 cents to 62 cents that it was originally targeting.

According to the consensus on FactSet, Wall Street analysts were looking for March-quarter revenue of $5.4 billion, and adjusted earnings per share of 53 cents.

"The GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin for Q3 was 220 basis points lower than Q2 primarily due to higher inventory reserves resulting from older-generation products and expedite costs to enable time-to-market for new products," the company said in a statement.

That is likely a reference to customers transitioning to the new Blackwell product family from Nvidia Corp. $(NVDA)$, its latest and higher-performing platform for AI computing. Nvidia has said it has sold all its available inventory of the Blackwell family, which debuted earlier this year.

Super Micro may be having to take an inventory write-down to account for older Nvidia GPUs, such as its Hopper family, or some other products that do not run with Blackwell, such as older forms of memory. Blackwell runs with high-bandwidth memory chips.

Super Micro "said it saw some order pushouts in the quarter as customers appear to be opting for next-generation products over current-gen ones," said Evercore ISI analysts led by Amit Daryanani, in a note to clients. "We believe this is reflective of SMCI being more Hopper-skewed while customers are opting to wait for Blackwell to ramp. This remains a concern for some vendors with excess Hopper inventory."

Evercore ISI also noted that while they do not cover Super Micro, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. $(HPE)$ executives made similar remarks in the company's earnings call last month, noting that about 70% of revenue in AI servers was coming from Blackwell-based servers, and that AI inventories were higher.

"Now it will take a little bit longer for us to basically transition that inventory as we go through the other two segment consumption, while the service providers and the model builders will shift much more quickly into the latest technologies," HPE Chief Executive Antonio Neri, told analysts at the time.

Super Micro shares, which jumped to around $97.67 in February, ahead of its filing of its delayed financial reports and got back in compliance with Nasdaq, are still up about 18% so far this year. But they were trading down nearly 70% from that 2025 peak in after-hours trading.

Super Micro said it will report its fiscal third-quarter results on Tuesday, May 6, after the market closes. Officials at Super Micro and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.