Nvidia Hikes RTX Pro 6000 to $16,000 as GDDR7 Memory Costs Explode

Nvidia raised the price of its professional workstation graphics card, the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, to $16,000 on August 12 — a 20.8 percent increase in just two months, after the price was lifted to $13,250 in June — marking an 87 percent rise over 17 months from its $8,565 launch price, the Seoul Economic Daily reported.

A Memory Squeeze

The increases stem from a sharp rise in GDDR7 memory costs: soaring demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI data center GPUs has led memory makers to concentrate production lines on HBM, tightening supply of the GDDR7 chips used in gaming and professional cards and pushing their prices up. An abnormal situation has emerged in which a 3GB GDDR7 memory chip offers 50 percent more capacity than a 2GB chip but costs more than three times as much. The RTX Pro 6000 packs 96GB of GDDR7, and supply problems with other components such as multilayer ceramic capacitors are compounding the increases.

Chipflation Spreads

Nvidia earlier raised prices on its consumer RTX 50 series graphics cards by 20 to 30 percent — its third price adjustment this year — with increases that once applied only to premium models now spreading across the lineup. The effects are reaching smartphones too: Google launched its Pixel 11 with a starting price of $899, up $100, and cut the RAM in base Pro models to 12GB from 16GB. A Google official told the Seoul Economic Daily the tech industry is facing a severe, supplier-driven RAM shortage.