• Nvidia’s newest AI chip will cost anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000, CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC.
• The Blackwell chip, unveiled Monday, is a big step up from its predecessor, Hopper.
• Hopper could cost roughly $40,000 in high demand; the A100 before it cost much less at around $10,000.

Nvidia showed off its latest innovation in AI chips this week, and the groundbreaking technology isn’t cheap.

The new Blackwell chip, unveiled Monday, will cost anywhere between $30,000 and $40,000, CEO Jensen Huang said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.

The chip has 208 billion transistors, 128 billion more than its Hopper predecessor, is capable of five times the AI performance, and can help reduce AI inference costs and energy consumption by up to 25 times, according to Nvidia.

Its predecessor, Hopper, also fetched prices in the same range during the mad dash for the chip, as companies scrambled to get their hands on the processors powering the generative AI boom.

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has said Meta is looking to buy roughly 350,000 of the H100 chips by the end of 2024. Including similar chips, this would bring the company’s total stockpile to around 600,000 by the end of this year, he added.

Before the rush to buy up Hopper chips, Nvidia’s A100 chips went for much less, at closer to $10,000, according to CNBC.