Nvidia’s Blackwell AI graphics engine will cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit, according to CEO Jensen Huang on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
“We had to invent some new technology to make it possible,” Huang explained, holding out a Blackwell chip. He calculated that Nvidia spent approximately $10 billion on research and development costs.
The price suggests that the chip, which is expected to be in high demand for training and deploying AI software such as ChatGPT, would be priced similarly to its predecessor, the H100, also known as the Hopper, which cost between $25,000 and $40,000 per chip, according to analyst estimates. The Hopper generation was introduced in 2022,
Nvidia’s AI chips saw a considerable price hike from the previous generation.
Later, Huang told CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos that the cost includes not only the chip, but also the design of data centers and integration with other companies’ data centers.
Nvidia introduces a new generation of AI chips every two years. The most recent, such as Blackwell, are generally faster and more energy efficient, and Nvidia takes advantage of the hype surrounding a new generation to increase demand for new GPUs. Blackwell has two chips and is physically larger than the previous generation.
Nvidia’s AI processors have tripled quarterly Nvidia sales since the AI boom began in late 2022, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was introduced. Over the last year, the majority of top AI businesses and developers have trained their AI models with Nvidia’s H100. Meta, for example, reported purchasing hundreds of thousands of Nvidia H100 GPUs earlier this year.
Nvidia doesn’t reveal the list pricing of its CPUs. The price of Nvidia processors varies by configuration and whether they are purchased directly from Nvidia or through a vendor (e.g., Dell, HP). or Supermicro, which creates AI servers. Some servers are equipped with up to eight AI GPUs.
On Monday, Nvidia introduced at least three variants of the Blackwell AI accelerator: the B100, the B200, and the GB200, which combines two Blackwell GPUs with an Arm-based CPU. They feature somewhat different memory configurations and are scheduled to ship later this year.
