As prices of components are increasing rapidly due to high demand from the AI sector, the cost of these machines is also increasing significantly. Morgan Stanley Research estimates that a next-generation Vera Rubin-based VR200 NVL72 rack will cost major hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs) around $7.8 million per unit (via @Aaronwei3n), which is tangibly more than about $4 million per GB300 NVL72. Furthermore, because every VR200 NVL72 rack packs plenty of DRAM and NAND, memory now accounts for around 25% of the total cost.

Nvidia plans to charge $55,000 per Rubin GPU and $5,000 per Vera CPU when selling them in volume inside VR200 NVL72 chassis to hyperscalers, according to Morgan Stanley. Although the upcoming VR200 NVL72 racks use the already familiar Oberon chassis, they use more sophisticated switching, networking, printed circuit board (PCB), cooling, power supply, and even chip packaging components, which increases bill-of-material (BOM) costs and eventually the price of the systems. As a result, each VR200 NVL72 will cost hyperscalers around $7.8 million, according to Morgan Stanley, which is higher than around $7 million we were told by one of our sources in late March. Meanwhile, the cost of memory within a VR200 NVL72 rack will be about $2 million, up 435% from the memory cost in GB300 NVL72, according to the same figures.

There are several reasons why the cost of memory is expected to account for 25% of the cost of a VR200 NVL72 system and why the system carries $2 million worth of memory.

First up, each of such racks now contains 54 TB of LPDDR5X memory, up from 17 TB of LPDDR5X in the case of a GB200 NVL72, a threefold increase. SemiAnalysis estimates that Nvidia paid $8 per GB per GB of LPDDR5X in Q1, though that price may increase as demand rises in the coming quarters, especially if we are talking about SOCAMM2 modules that are expensive to make and test. In any case, even at $8 per GB, each GB200 NVL72 machine carries $136,000 worth of LPDDR5X memory, whereas each VR200 NVL72 system will contain $408,000 worth of LPDDR5X content. If the price rises to $10, we are talking about $540,000 for LPDDR5X alone. Note that even $10 per GB may be an underestimate* as Nvidia adds its own markup.

Secondly, each VR200 NVL72 rack carries about $1 million or more of 3D NAND storage, up from virtually zero inside GB200 NVL72.

As a result, $2 million of memory content per Vera Rubin NVL72 rack is not something completely unexpected: the system uses a lot of LPDDR5X and 3D NAND memory (not to mention HBM4 memory onboard of Rubin GPUs), and memory now comes at massive prices.

*Contract price of DDR5 memory is now between $12 and $16 per GB, depending on various factors and luck, according to Framework. Spot price for DDR5 was about $20 per GB on average at press time, according to DRAMeXchange. LPDDR5X is more expensive than DDR5. When installed on SOCAMM2 modules (which are exclusively used by Nvidia's Vera CPUs), it will get even more costly, especially when Nvidia's markup is added.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.