NVIDIA Blackwell

Blackwell is NVIDIA’s data-center GPU architecture, announced at its GTC conference on March 18, 2024 as the successor to Hopper and named after the mathematician David Harold Blackwell.¹ NVIDIA says every Blackwell GPU packs 208 billion transistors on a custom TSMC 4NP process, as two reticle-limited dies joined by a 10 TB/s chip-to-chip link that act as a single GPU.² The architecture added a second-generation Transformer Engine with 4-bit floating-point (FP4) support.¹ It ships in two main forms covered on MetaPrompt: the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which pairs two Blackwell GPUs with a Grace CPU and fills the liquid-cooled, 72-GPU GB200 NVL72 rack,³ and the eight-GPU HGX B200 server board.¹ The later Blackwell Ultra GPUs, in the GB300 NVL72 and HGX B300, are a separate part.³⁵

NVIDIA’s datasheet gives each Blackwell GPU in the GB200 NVL72 186 GB of HBM3E at 8 TB/s and a configurable maximum of 1,200 W, against 180 GB at 7.7 TB/s and up to 1,000 W in the HGX B200. It rates the GB200 NVL72 GPU at 10 PFLOPS of FP8 with sparsity, and states dense throughput as one-half of that, 5 PFLOPS.² Those memory figures put Blackwell at #10 and #11 in AI Accelerators With the Most HBM per Chip (October 2026). NVIDIA said on February 4, 2025 that CoreWeave had become the first cloud provider to make Blackwell generally available, with GB200 NVL72-based instances,⁴ and its HGX page says HGX B200 is shipping now.⁵

Blackwell also fills some of the largest AI campuses. Crusoe says Oracle began delivering the first GB200 racks to the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, in June 2025, a site covered in Stargate’s Sites: Operating vs Under Construction vs Planned.⁶ Microsoft describes its Fairwater datacenters as built on GB200 NVL72 racks that can scale to hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GPUs,⁷ and SpaceX’s S-1 filing says the first cluster at xAI’s Colossus II, about 110,000 GB200 processors and about 210 megawatts of compute power, came online in 91 days.⁸ Those sites appear in Largest AI Data Centers by Estimated Power Draw (October 2026).