April 17, 2023: Nvidia’s most-advanced graphics cards are selling for over $40,000 on eBay as demand increased for chips required to train and deploy A.I. software.

The costs for Nvidia’s H100 processors noting by 3D gaming pioneer and retired Meta consulting technology chief John Carmack on Twitter. On Friday, nearly eight H100s were listed on eBay at prices which range from $39,995 to just under $46,000. A few retailers have offered it in the past for nearly $36,000.

The H100, announced in the previous year, is Nvidia’s latest flagship A.I. chip, succeeding the A100, a roughly $10,000 chip called the “workhorse” for A.I. applications.

Developers use the H100 to build so-called large language models (LLMs) at the heart of A.I. applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They rely on hefty computing power so the A.I. model can generate text, images or predictions. Running those systems is expensive and needs powerful computers to churn through terabytes of information for days or weeks.

Training huge A.I. models, like GPT, requires hundreds of high-end Nvidia GPUs working together.

Microsoft spent hundreds of millions on tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 chips, helping build ChatGPT. Nvidia controls the huge majority of the market for A.I. chips.

Nvidia offers a supercomputer with eight GPUs working together called the DGX. Earlier this year, the firm announced new services allowing companies to rent access to DGX computers for $37,000 monthly. At that price, the system would use Nvidia’s older A100 processors.

Nvidia states that the H100 is the initial chip optimized for the specific A.I. architecture underpinning many recent advances in A.I., called transformers. Industry experts state that more powerful chips will be required to build even huge and more data-hungry models than currently available.