> When you can sell an enterprise-grade card with 40-80GB of VRAM for $50k
ADA 6000 RTX (48GB) — an enterprise (workstation) cars — is about $10K sticker price. The differentiator between those and data center cards in the 40GB-80GB range is, obviously, not just VRAM.
Also, as samspenc points out, that RTX 6000 is using the same AD102 chip found in a consumer RTX 4090, just with marginally more CUDA cores, TMUs, ROPs, etc.
The most substantial difference between the two is that the $10k card has twice the VRAM of the $2k card.
I know it sounds outrageously oversimplified, but Nvidia can indeed more or less print money by attaching a few extra memory chips to what is otherwise a flagship consumer-oriented graphics processor.
The profit margins on the H100, for reference, are estimated to be around one thousand percent (1000%), i.e., they sell for ~10x as much as it costs Nvidia to make them, and demand for them still grossly exceeds the total supply. See: https://the-decoder.com/nvidias-h100-gpu-sells-like-hot-cake...
The RTX ADA 6000 actually slightly performs worse than a consumer-grade 4090 (~10% less performant), even though it retails for 4-5x more ($8000 for ADA 6000 compared to $1500-2000 for a 4090).
ADA 6000 RTX (48GB) — an enterprise (workstation) cars — is about $10K sticker price. The differentiator between those and data center cards in the 40GB-80GB range is, obviously, not just VRAM.