The maker of expensive printer ink, HP has started flogging a desktop workstation for $132,000, which is enough money to buy a decent house in some parts of the world and still have change for a computer.
The ZGX Fury G1n AI Station targets businesses desperate to run enormous AI models without handing their data to cloud providers. The machine looks like a fairly ordinary workstation, although opening the case reveals hardware normally found in a data centre. HP has apparently decided that the best way to compete with cloud computing is to stuff a server into something that fits under a desk.
At the heart of the beast is Nvidia’s GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Superchip, combining a 72-core Arm Neoverse V2 processor with a Blackwell Ultra graphics accelerator. It comes with 496GB of LPDDR5X-6400 system memory and 252GB of HBM3e graphics memory, giving the machine a combined 748GB. That should be enough to keep Chrome happy for a couple of hours.
The two memory pools have different jobs and considerably different performance characteristics. The Grace processor’s LPDDR5X delivers up to 396GB/s of bandwidth, while the Blackwell Ultra’s HBM3e manages 7.1TB/s. Nvidia’s coherent memory architecture lets the CPU and GPU share data efficiently without pretending every byte is ordinary desktop RAM.
HP claims the workstation can deliver up to 20 petaflops of AI performance using FP4 precision; that figure depends heavily on the workload and mathematical precision being used. It is a long way from the sort of performance measurements normally used to persuade gamers that their latest graphics card was worth the divorce.
The outfit reckons its machine can handle local development and fine-tuning of models containing up to 100 billion parameters. It claims inference support for models with as many as one trillion parameters when using FP4 quantisation. Actual limits will depend on the model’s architecture, memory requirements and the amount of working space needed to process requests.
HP offers three main configurations. The basic ZGX Fury costs $132,000, while adding an Nvidia RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell card with 16GB of GDDR7 pushes the price to $133,000. Customers with another $4,000 burning a hole in their corporate trousers can instead get an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF with 24 GB.
The additional cards provide conventional workstation graphics capabilities alongside the integrated Blackwell Ultra accelerator. The RTX PRO 4000 configuration brings the combined graphics memory capacity to 276GB, although its GDDR7 and the GB300’s HBM3e remain separate memory pools. Anyone expecting to play games on this monster might be disappointed to learn that spending six figures doesn’t automatically make something a sensible gaming PC.
Cooling the equipment requires a closed-loop liquid-cooling system backed by six fans. HP has fitted a 1,600W Titanium-rated power supply, which should give the electricity meter something interesting to do. American buyers will need to pay attention to the electrical requirements, since the machine is designed around a 200–240V supply.
Despite its desktop appearance, the Fury can be installed in a standard 5U server rack. It supports up to 32TB of storage, provides three PCIe 5.0 expansion slots and includes dual 400Gbps QSFP112 networking ports through an Nvidia ConnectX-8 SuperNIC. Those connections let companies link multiple machines when one $132,000 computer proves insufficient.
The workstation ships with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Nvidia’s AI development tools, making it far more useful to researchers than to someone hoping to install Windows and play Call of Duty. HP includes remote management facilities and hardware monitoring, acknowledging that customers spending this sort of money generally employ people whose job is to prevent expensive equipment from going tits up.
HP believes local AI processing will appeal to organisations that handle confidential information or face substantial cloud computing bills. Running large models inside the company can give developers greater control over their data and infrastructure, although the economics depend on how frequently the hardware is used. A machine costing $132,000 and sitting idle for most of the day is unlikely to impress the finance department.
The ZGX Fury is available through HP’s US store and resellers, with higher-priced configurations listed alongside the basic machine. HP previously announced the hardware in October, but the newly disclosed retail prices reveal how much the outfit expects businesses to pay to bring Nvidia’s data-centre technology into the office.
