It's not particularly more expensive than its predecessors.
CNBC used an interview with NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang to find out how much the company values the Blackwell family of computing accelerators presented yesterday. The CEO of NVIDIA surprisingly admitted that customers need to focus on the price range from $30,000 to $40,000.
Image Source: CNBC
Third-party experts claim that Hopper generation accelerators (H100) cost from $25,000 to $40,000, so at the upper end of the range there is no difference between the B200 and its predecessor. Moreover, at the time of its debut, Hopper was significantly more expensive than its predecessor, the A100. According to Huang, the company spent about $10 billion on the development of Blackwell, and part of this money was spent on integrating the new solution into the server infrastructure, and not just on developing the B200 chip itself.
At a conference for investors in California, Jensen Huang separately said that corporate clients will spend $250 billion annually on the purchase of equipment for northern systems, and NVIDIA claims a significant part of this amount. As with the H100, the company expects a shortage of Blackwell family accelerators on the market, although it will try to eliminate it. We emphasize that the speculative factor raises the cost of accelerators on the market, so the level of real prices for Blackwell may move away from the range named by the head of NVIDIA in the upward direction.