Prebuilt vLLM wheels / official images fail on RTX 50-series (Blackwell, SM120/SM121) — "no kernel image" / "sm_120 not compatible"

[zyforsure]

🚀 The feature, motivation and pitch

Summary

vLLM fails to run on NVIDIA RTX 50-series GPUs (Blackwell, SM120/SM121) when installed from the prebuilt PyPI wheels (and/or official Docker images). The runtime crashes with errors like:

• RuntimeError: CUDA error: no kernel image is available for execution on the device
• or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50xx with CUDA capability sm_120 is not compatible with the current PyTorch installation

This looks like the distributed binaries were built without Blackwell arch flags (SM120/SM121), even though the system meets the CUDA minimum for Blackwell.

Reproduction steps

1. Create a clean environment

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -U pip

### Alternatives

_No response_

### Additional context

_No response_

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[ehfd]

Sounds like you must use CUDA 13.x, because CUDA 13 in Blackwell is mandatory.