NVIDIA's Next-Generation Hardware

NVIDIA has begun delivering its highly anticipated Blackwell B200 chips, with OpenAI securing one of the first units. These chips represent a significant leap in AI computing capabilities, offering 3x faster training performance and a remarkable 15x improvement in inference speed compared to their previous H100 generation. Each B200 unit, priced at approximately $400,000, comes equipped with eight NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, 1440GB of total VRAM, and delivers 72 petaflops for training and 144 petaflops for inference.

The company has also made waves in the AI model space by releasing a fine-tuned version of Llama 3.1 that reportedly outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on various benchmarks. The model, called Nemotron-70B instruct, demonstrates NVIDIA's growing ambitions beyond hardware.