Nvidia confirms Blackwell B200 GPU pricing at $30,000-$40,000 per unit, approximately 2x H100 cost.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed following GTC 2024 that the company's cutting-edge Blackwell B200 AI chip is priced between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit. According to CNBC, NVIDIA has invested over $10 billion in research and development of the Blackwell chip, which outperforms all other AI chips on the market by a significant margin. While more expensive than its predecessor, the B200 pricing reflects the integrated cost of the chip and its incorporation into data center systems.

The new Blackwell AI chip arrives as a successor to NVIDIA's H100 Hopper AI processor, introduced in 2022 at a cost of $25,000 to $40,000. NVIDIA announced three variants of its latest AI accelerators: the B100, the B200, and the GB200, which combines two Blackwell chips with an ARM-based CPU. Compared to the H100, the B200 is not only more powerful but also more power-efficient. Blackwell delivers four times the performance of Hopper, and the B200 features 288GB of HBM3e memory specifically designed for AI workloads, cloud computing, and data center applications.

The performance gains are substantial across benchmarks. The B200 offers 7 times more performance than the H100 on the GPT-3 benchmark, while 2000 Blackwell chips could train a model like GPT-4 with over 1.8 trillion parameters in just 90 days. A single Blackwell AI processor can deliver up to 20 petaflops of FP4 horsepower and consists of 208 billion transistors, representing a significant engineering achievement.

The GB200, combining two Blackwell AI processors, delivers real-world AI performance with 30x LLM inference workload performance while achieving 25 per cent more power efficiency than the H100. As NVIDIA Data Center stated on March 18, 2024, the Blackwell architecture fuels "a new era of computing and generative AI with unparalleled performance, efficiency, and scale."