Nvidia’s New AI Chip Costs $70,000 - And It’s Already Sold Out

Tilesh Bo
March 26, 2025 | 5-minute read

The AI gold rush has a new king—Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 sold out within minutes of launch at $70,000 per unit. With a 30X speed boost over the H100 and data centers scrambling to backorder, here’s why this changes everything… and why critics call it "economic warfare."

---

Blackwell B200: By the Numbers

Leaked benchmarks from MLCommons show unprecedented performance:

Metric	H100	B200	Real-World Impact
AI Training Speed	4 petaflops	120 petaflops	Cuts GPT-5 training from 3 months → 3 days
Energy Efficiency	700W	1,000W	30% more power for 20x output
Memory Bandwidth	3TB/s	8TB/s	Runs 1M+ LLM conversations simultaneously

Shocking Detail: Each B200 contains 208 billion transistors—more than 27,000 iPhone 15 chips combined.

---

Why Tech Giants Are Panic-Buying

The 3-Way AI Arms Race

1. Microsoft/Azure: Ordered 50,000 units for OpenAI’s GPT-5 training

2. Meta: Converting data centers to 100% Blackwell by 2026

3. Tesla: Using B200s to process real-world FSD v13 data

"Whoever controls Blackwell supply controls AI’s next decade."
— Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO (March 2025 Keynote)

The Dark Side: $70K Price Tag

• Startups priced out: Equivalent to 3 years’ salary for a senior AI engineer

• Scalpers already flipping: eBay listings hit $125,000 for "guaranteed Q3 delivery"

• Geopolitical tension: US bans B200 exports to China—Huawei’s Ascend 910B now 5 years behind

---

Technical Breakdown: What Makes It Revolutionary

1. Transformer Engine 2.0

• Processes sparse AI models (like ChatGPT) 10x more efficiently

• Real-world example: Reduces ChatGPT’s response cost from $0.01\to$0.0001 per query

• 
  

2. NVLink 5.0

Feature	H100	B200
GPU-to-GPU Speed	900GB/s	1.8TB/s
Max Cluster Size	256 GPUs	10,000+ GPUs

Game-changer: Enables single models with 100T+ parameters (GPT-5 rumored at ~50T)

3. "AI Firewall" Security

• Blocks model theft via side-channel attacks (targeting Google/Meta leaks)

• Controversy: Nvidia can remotely disable chips in sanctioned countries

• 
  

---

Who Wins & Loses?

Winners	Losers
Cloud providers (AWS/Azure)	AI startups without funding
Crypto miners (yes, really)	Chinese tech firms
NVIDIA shareholders (+400% since 2023)	AMD/Intel

Unexpected Twist: Ethereum miners are buying B200s to train AI instead of mining—earning $300/day per chip.

---

What’s Next?

• 2025: Nvidia teases "Rubin" ultra-GPU (3nm process, 500B transistors)

• 2026: US/China chip war escalates—TSMC building Arizona fabs for Nvidia-only production

• 2027: Experts predict $1,000 AI chips matching B200’s power

• 
  

---

Final Thought

The B200 isn’t just hardware—it’s the ticket to AI supremacy. With 5-year waitlists now common, one question remains:

**Would you pay $70Kforthischip?\ast \ast [Yes][No][I\text{’}llwaitforthe$1K knockoff