Nvidia Reportedly Rises Over 15% on AI Server Amid Surging Memory Costs

According to media reports, Nvidia has told some of its largest customers that the prices of servers containing its AI chips will rise by more than 15% in many cases. The increases will take effect on Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems shipping early next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The size of each increase will depend on the chip generation and the memory configuration involved. Companies that build servers under contract for large data center operators, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, have recently notified their customers of the forthcoming increases.

AI systems carry enormous memory loadouts, with Nvidia's Rubin GPU shipping with up to 288GB of HBM4 per package, and the NVL72 rack-scale system combines 72 of those GPUs, putting more than 20TB of HBM in a single rack before accounting for the LPDDR attached to its Vera CPUs. With HBM production consuming roughly four times the wafer area of equivalent conventional DRAM, memory has become one of the largest line items in an AI server's bill of materials, and it's continuing to rise at a stratospheric pace.

Nvidia has already passed rising costs through to consumers, raising prices on GeForce graphics cards earlier this month. It is said that the same unrelenting pressure has now reached the top of the Nvidia stack, where hyperscalers as well as PC builders will be absorbing the increase. A 15% rise on rack-scale systems that sell for several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands of dollars per rack across deployments that run to thousands of racks.