NVIDIA · Blackwell · Layer 2
NVIDIA B200
The default frontier accelerator. If you have no specific reason to choose otherwise, this is what the market chose.
rent Rentable by the hour from multiple clouds; purchasable at scale.
Specifications
- Memory
- 192 GB HBM3E
- Bandwidth
- 8 TB/s
- Compute
- FP4 and FP8 sparse; vendor figures vary by configuration
- Power
- Up to 1,000 W per GPU in liquid-cooled configurations
- Interconnect
- NVLink 5
- Software
- CUDA
- Form factor
- accelerator
- Workload
- both
Verified 2026-09-09. Fields reading “not published” are exactly that — we do not estimate a figure a vendor withholds.
The catch
192 GB is less memory than AMD's MI355X at 288 GB, and for memory-bound inference that gap is the whole argument.
The economics
CUDA maturity is the real product. The chip is competitive; the software moat is why it wins procurement.
Cost per million tokens is the metric that decides most real purchases, and there is no neutral benchmark for it — every published figure comes from a company selling one side of the comparison. Read all of them, ours included, as claims rather than measurements.
The power question underneath this
A rack of frontier accelerators draws 120–200 kW against a 2026 average of about 27 kW, and the US grid interconnection queue exceeds 2,600 GW with waits approaching five years. Whether you can energise this part is now a harder question than whether you can buy it.
Layer 1 — Energy · The interconnection queue · Rack power density · Tokens per watt
Where you actually rent this
Choosing the part is the easy half. The same accelerator rents for wildly different money depending only on who you rent it from — the cheapest and dearest published on-demand price for an H100 sit 5.6× apart — and the provider, not the chip, is what decides whether you can leave later.
Layer 2.5 — Compute providers · The GPU cost calculator · B200 rental prices, every company
Compared against
- NVIDIA B200 vs AMD Instinct MI355X — The memory argument, stated cleanly: 192 GB of CUDA against 288 GB of ROCm.Compare with AMD Instinct MI355X
- Meta MTIA v2 vs NVIDIA B200 — The custom-silicon question in one line: every MTIA Meta deploys is a B200 NVIDIA does not sell.Compare with Meta MTIA v2
Related silicon
- NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 — 13.5 TB HBM3E across the rack, rent
- NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 — Higher HBM3E capacity than GB200; per-rack figure not consistently published, rent
- NVIDIA H100 — 80 GB HBM3, rent
- NVIDIA H200 — 141 GB HBM3E, rent
- NVIDIA Vera Rubin VR200 NVL144 — HBM4. NVIDIA quotes 20.7 TB per rack at NVL72 scale; the NVL144 CPX configuration is quoted at 100 TB of fast memory per rack., rent
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell — 96 GB GDDR7, buy
Sources
Want this whole layer as one table?
The accelerators on these pages as a single CSV — memory, bandwidth, compute, power, interconnect, software stack, availability, who each part is for and the catch — ready to sort, filter or load into a notebook.
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