NVIDIA Eyes Software Revenue With a $2,000 per GPU Yearly Figure From Huang

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has put a rough price on the software side of the company’s AI business. During a Q&A session at GTC Berlin last week, Huang said software licensing will become a growing part of NVIDIA’s business, and that it costs about $2,000 per GPU per year to run all the NVIDIA software that powers agents in AI factories. The Register was first to report it, and Huang seems to have offered it as an example rather than a formal price.

The number is a bit confusing, since NVIDIA already sells its AI Enterprise suite on a per-GPU basis. The company’s own licensing guide lists it at $4,500 per GPU for a one-year subscription with support, or $18,000 per GPU for five years. NVIDIA hasn’t said whether Huang’s $2,000 figure covers the same software, a narrower agent-focused bundle, or a future licensing model, so it probably shouldn’t be read as a price cut. There’s also no word on timing.

During the same event, NVIDIA announced its OpenShell Reference Architecture, which pairs Vera Rubin systems for inference with Vera CPUs for running agents, and BlueField-4 DPUs running NVIDIA Sentry to watch what those agents do. OpenShell itself is an open-source runtime that sandboxes agents, and Huang pointed to it when asked about AI safety. For scale, every million GPUs licensed at $2,000 would bring in $2 billion a year, so it’s easy to see why NVIDIA wants recurring software revenue on top of hardware it is already scrambling to expand.