Nvidia shows its roadmap. What that means for the price you pay per answer
Blackwell Ultra was announced at GTC yesterday. Chip roadmaps are three years from your invoice, but they do tell you which direction it moves.
At its GTC conference in San Jose, running 17 to 21 March 2025, Nvidia announced Blackwell Ultra and outlined the generation after it, framing the hardware around what it calls AI reasoning and agentic workloads.
None of this is a purchase decision for an SME. It is, however, the upstream end of a supply chain that ends in your monthly bill, and it is worth knowing which way that chain is pointing.
The one thing worth extracting
The hardware is being built specifically for models that think longer before answering. That is a direct response to what happened between September and February: reasoning models, extended thinking, research agents.
Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions.
Per-answer costs should keep falling for ordinary work, as each generation does more per franc of electricity. Every month of this blog since October has recorded that trend continuing.
The expensive tier will get more expensive to serve, because a model thinking for twenty minutes consumes what a hundred ordinary answers consume. Expect the gap between cheap and premium AI to widen rather than narrow.
What to do with that
Sort your tasks now, before your provider sorts them for you with a price change.
Most SME work — drafting, summarising, extracting, translating — sits firmly in the cheap tier and will get cheaper. Budget it as a small, declining line and stop worrying about it.
A handful of tasks genuinely need the expensive tier: complex contract comparison, multi-constraint planning, deep research. Know which those are and roughly how often they occur, because that is the part of your bill that can surprise you.
The trap in the middle
The failure mode is using premium capability for routine work without noticing. It happens by default when a tool decides for itself how hard to think and nobody watches the meter.
Ask your vendor once: can I see, per month, how much of my usage was the expensive kind? Vendors who can show you that have built something considered. Vendors who cannot will present you with a quarterly figure you have no way to explain.