NVIDIA has significantly increased its order for Blackwell accelerators from TSMC, TrendForce reports citing United Daily News (UDN). According to the source, NVIDIA intends to receive not 40 thousand, but 60 thousand new-generation accelerators, and 50 thousand of them will be GB200 NVL36 rack-mount systems. At the same time, Blackwell will still be in short supply, as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang promised back in the winter.
The B200 includes two tiles, united by 2.5D CoWoS-L packaging and connected by an NV-HBI interconnect. The chip has 208 billion transistors manufactured using TSMC’s custom 4NP process. The GB200 combines two B200 accelerators and one 72-core Grace Arm processor. And the GB200 NVL72 super accelerator, in turn, combines within one rack 18 1U nodes with a pair of GB200 in each (Bianca board, 72 × B200 and 36 × Grace), connected by the NVLink 5 bus. This entire system consumes about 120 kW, equipped with a life support system and a single DC power bus.
NVIDIA GB200
However, the GB200 NVL72 has quite specific requirements for the environment, so NVIDIA offers a simpler super accelerator – the GB200 NVL36, which should become the most widespread in this series. This platform similarly occupies an entire rack, but uses 2U nodes with the same Bianca boards (36xB200 and 18xGrace in total), consuming only 66 kW. This still implies the use of two GB200 NVL36 racks connected by an interconnect, so the GB200 NVL72 still turns out to be a more energy-efficient solution.
Image source: NVIDIA
As SemiAnalysis notes, the GB200 NVL36 will also be available with Ariel boards that have one B200 and one Grace chip each. Finally, in the second quarter of 2025, the B200 NVL72 and B200 NVL36 systems with x86 processors (Miranda) will appear. In addition, NVIDIA presented separate MGX nodes GB200 NVL2 with a pair of GB200. In general, the company will need a lot of B200 accelerators to surely maintain its leadership in the market.
According to UDN, the GB200 NVL36 will cost about $1.8 million, and the GB200 NVL72 will cost $3 million. A single GB200 will cost $60–$70 thousand, and the simplest B100 accelerator is priced at $30–$35 thousand. It should be emphasized that this estimates of third party analysts. The company itself does not officially disclose the cost of its products. This is an established practice in this market, which only Intel went against by publicly naming the cost of Gaudi AI accelerators. However, earlier the head of NVIDIA hinted that the B200 would cost approximately $30–$40 thousand.