--- title: "Blackwell: what it means · The AI Compute Race · DRYBURGH" source: https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/blackwell description: "Blackwell: The NVIDIA accelerator generation after Hopper, the H100's, including the B200 and the GB200 NVL72 rack. Chapter 4." --- # Blackwell What does “Blackwell” mean? BlackwellThe NVIDIA accelerator generation after Hopper, the H100’s, including the B200 and the GB200 NVL72 rack. *Chapter 4.* From *The AI Compute Race*. [Read the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#buy) ## Where the book uses it - [Chapter 4 — One Rack](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes/chapter-4)How a datacenter is actually built, from a converted factory in Memphis to a greenfield campus in Texas, and what the clock from first ground to first power really measures. ## Sources that use it - CME Group and Silicon Data, “CME Group and Silicon Data to Launch Compute Futures on October 5 to Unlock New Way to Hedge AI Risks,” press release, 11 August 2026 (NYMEX-listed contracts, pending regulatory review; each a month’s rent on an Nvidia H100 or Blackwell B200, tracking Silicon Data’s GPU rental-price indexes; Keavey (“compute has become the currency of the AI age”) and Li (“a public, tradable reference price for the resource every AI system runs on”) quotes) [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#cme-compute-futures) - Harsh Singh Banwait, “NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave: 10x More Tokens Per Megawatt Than Blackwell,” CoreWeave blog, 21 July 2026 (CoreWeave’s own measurement, on DeepSeek R1: “At a matched interactivity target, Vera Rubin NVL72 generated 10x tokens-per-second per megawatt compared to NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 on the same DeepSeek R1 workload”; the conditions, “with all major, state-of-the-art inference optimizations turned on,” among them “large-scale expert parallelism, NVFP4 precision, multi-token prediction, and disaggregated prefill and decode”; the page’s other wording of the result, “up to 10x higher tokens per megawatt”; what it means for customers, in the company’s words: “run far more reasoning-model traffic within the same power budget or run the same traffic on far less power”; CoreWeave sells the capacity it measured, and NVIDIA’s blog of the same day relays the figure as its own platform’s; the comparison on both systems, “This evaluation compares the performance on each platform with all major, state-of-the-art inference optimizations turned on”; read in the page as served in October 2026, which carries its publication date). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#coreweave-vera-rubin-jul26) - Meta Engineering, “Meta’s infrastructure evolution and the advent of AI,” 29 September 2025 (Hyperion to come online beginning in 2028 and scale to 5 GW; the Catalina reference design of 72 Blackwell GPUs at about 140 kW in the accelerator portion of a six-rack pod; fleet deploying GB200, beginning GB300, also AMD MI300 and MTIA; “Once finished, the Hyperion cluster will have the ability to scale up to a capacity of 5 gigawatts”; “Prometheus, our 1-gigawatt cluster, is currently underway”; “We accomplished this by building this cluster across several of our traditional data center buildings as well as several weatherproof tents, and adjacent colocation facilities”; “We are also evolving our software stack, including Twine and MAST, to support long-distance training across a geographically distributed set of data centers”). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#meta-engineering-sep25) - Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic, “Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announce strategic partnerships,” joint announcement published simultaneously on all three newsrooms, 18 November 2025 (Anthropic “has committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and to contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt”; “Anthropic’s compute commitment will initially be up to one gigawatt of compute capacity with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems”; “NVIDIA and Microsoft are committing to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion respectively in Anthropic”; no term is stated for the $30 billion; Anthropic’s copy alone closes “Amazon remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner”, and NVIDIA’s alone writes “Microsoft Azure AI Foundry” where the other two write “Microsoft Foundry”). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#anthropic-msft-nvidia-nov25) - NVIDIA, “GB300 NVL72” product page and NVL72 AI-factory reference architecture, components page (“Full rack requiring up to 142 kW”; 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs; liquid-cooled; each GPU with eighteen fifth-generation NVLink links, “one per in-rack NVSwitch via the copper backplane,” so that “a single rack may form a fully connected L1 Domain with 72 GPUs,” read 20 September 2026), accessed 29 August and 4 September 2026. [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#nvda-gb300) And 13 more: [search the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources). ## Related terms - [Accelerator](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/accelerator) - [GB200 NVL72](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/gb200-nvl72) - [Hopper](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/hopper) - [B200](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/b200) - [H100](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/h100) - [Rack](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/rack) - [GB300](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/gb300) - [Vera Rubin](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/vera-rubin) - [122 days](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/122-days) - [Abilene](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/abilene) - [Colossus](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/colossus) - [CPU](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/cpu) From the glossary of The AI Compute Race. - [Campuses](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/ledger) - [Tests](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests) - [Scorecard](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard) - [Data](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/data/releases) - [Chapter by chapter](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/companion) - [The record at a glance](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/observatory) - [The machine](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/machine) - [One campus, four futures](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/hyperion) - [Glossary](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary) - [People](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/people) - [Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources) - [Notes](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes) - [Where the book was wrong](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/corrections) - [Where its sources were wrong](https://dryburgh.com/corrections?book=vol1) - [The Paper](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/paper) - [Consent](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/consent) - [Who builds and pays](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/parties) *The AI Compute Race: Five Races, One Machine* is a book by Lee S. Dryburgh, the first volume of THE COMPUTE ECONOMY, published by Dryburgh, an imprint of Contestra OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia; its record closes on 8 November 2026. [About the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1)[Tell me when it is out](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#notify)