A reseller priced Nvidia's 84GB RTX PRO 5500 at $17,999. The 96GB card is $16,000

An American government reseller has put a price on Nvidia's next workstation card, and it reads backwards. SHI Government Solutions lists the PNY-built RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell Workstation Edition with an MSRP of $17,999 and a discounted price of $17,408.63, per VideoCardz. The figure comes from the listing, not from Nvidia. The company's own product page for the card carries no price at all, only a pointer to OEM and distribution partners.

An 84-gigabyte card built to be shared

The spec sheet describes a Blackwell part with 84 GB of GDDR7 under error-correcting code, 1,398 GB/sec of bandwidth, PCIe Gen 5 x16 and a 600 W ceiling, air-cooled by default with a liquid-cooled option in the RXM form factor. What separates it from a desk-side card is Multi-Instance GPU. Nvidia's FAQ says one board splits into two fully isolated instances, each with its own memory, cache and compute cores, at up to 42 GB apiece. The pitch is rack-mounted workstation capacity shared across users, aimed at agentic AI, LLM inference and simulation. The only performance figure Nvidia offers is a vendor claim: fifth-generation Tensor Cores deliver "up to 3x the performance of the previous generation," with no benchmark attached.

The cheaper card has more of everything

Set the two Blackwell workstations side by side. The RTX PRO 6000 Workstation Edition carries 96 GB and 1,792 GB/sec, and, per VideoCardz, 24,064 CUDA cores; Nvidia's own marketplace prices it at $16,000.00, listed out of stock when I checked this week. The 5500 gives up 12 GB of memory, 2,304 cores (21,760 against 24,064) and roughly 22% of its bandwidth, and asks $1,999 more. Divided by capacity, those two attributed numbers come to about $214 per gigabyte against $167. VideoCardz quoted Alex Ziskind's reaction to the spread: "MSRP is $18k?!! You can still get a Pro 6000 for less than that."

What the spread is actually pricing

Memory, mostly. VideoCardz recorded two increases to the 6000's marketplace price this year without Nvidia announcing either, from $13,250 in June to $16,000 in August, and a card that sells out at list price invites a markup on anything adjacent. The 5500 is also the part Chinese buyers have been chasing: more than 6 million ordered against capacity Nvidia has privately put near 3 million, at roughly $11,400 each in bulk. Those are enterprise orders, not a government reseller's single-unit listing, and the r/LocalLLaMA thread on the price drew roughly 248 points and 119 comments. The useful part for local buyers is narrow. At $17,999 the 5500 is no longer the cheap route to 84 GB, and its case rests on MIG, power limits and rack density, not capacity per dollar.