Nvidia’s next-generation graphics processor for artificial intelligence, called Blackwell, will cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit, CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“This will cost $30 to $40 thousand dollars,” Huang said, holding up the Blackwell chip.
“We had to invent some new technology to make it possible,” he continued, estimating that Nvidia spent about $10 billion in research and development costs.
The price suggests that the chip, which is likely to be in hot demand for training and deploying AI software like ChatGPT, will be priced in a similar range to its predecessor, the H100, or the “Hopper” generation, which cost between $25,000 and $40,000 per chip, according to analyst estimates. The Hopper generation, introduced in 2022, represented a significant price increase for Nvidia’s AI chips over the previous generation.
Nvidia announces a new generation of AI chips about every two years. The latest, like Blackwell, are generally faster and more energy efficient, and Nvidia uses the publicity around a new generation to rake in orders for new GPUs. Blackwell combines two chips and is physically larger than the previous-generation.
Nvidia’s AI chips have driven a tripling of quarterly Nvidia sales since the AI boom kicked off in late 2022 when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was announced. Most of the top AI companies and developers have been using Nvidia’s H100 to train their AI models over the past year. For example, Meta is buying hundreds of thousands of Nvidia H100 GPUs, it said this year.
Nvidia does not reveal the list price for its chips. They come in several different configurations, and the price an end consumer like Meta or Microsoft might pay depends on factors such as the volume of chips purchased, or whether the customer buys the chips from Nvidia directly through a complete system or through a vendor like Dell, HP, or Supermicro that builds AI servers. Some servers are built with as many as eight AI GPUs.
On Monday, Nvidia announced at least three different versions of the Blackwell AI accelerator — a B100, a B200, and a GB200 that pairs two Blackwell GPUs with an Arm-based CPU. They have slightly different memory configurations and are expected to ship later this year.