Intel's Arc Pro B70 has climbed faster than AMD's 32GB Radeon AI Pro R9700, and memory costs alone can't explain why

Intel launched the Arc Pro B70 on March 25 with a suggested starting price of $949 for its own reference card. Built on the full "Big Battlemage" BMG-G31 die, it pairs 32 Xe2 cores with 32GB of ECC GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus. At that price, it undercut AMD's 32GB Radeon AI Pro R9700 by $350 and cost roughly half as much as Nvidia's 24GB RTX Pro 4000, which made it an obvious pick for running large language models locally.

A $949 card, now listed for up to $2,399

According to VideoCardz, Newegg's featured listings on October 27 showed Intel's own reference card at $2,394.86, ASRock's Arc Pro B70 Creator at $1,945.99, Maxsun's Turbo model at $2,195, and Gunnir's version at $2,399, although the outlet adds that "most of these featured offers come from third-party marketplace sellers rather than Newegg itself." German retailers now list the card from €1,599, including VAT. The same GPU is available, however, for $1,800 on Amazon, though the site carries a "high price" disclaimer.

The climb has been steady, not sudden. ASRock's Creator sold for $999.99 at Newegg as recently as July, before a hike at the start of August took it to $1,299.99. Reporting that 30% rise, Tom's Hardware noted that "the component crisis continues to wreak havoc across the computer industry," and found a roughly 26% increase in Germany and a far steeper one in South Korea, where price aggregator Danawa showed the B70 going from ₩1,889,980 on July 21 to ₩2,798,980 by August 16, a 48% jump. B&H was already listing Intel's reference card at $1,779.

Marketplace sellers set the ceiling, but the floor is rising too

That marketplace caveat matters, and VideoCardz also notes that Newegg itself had none in stock. The price tracker vga.live, which counts only cards sold by retailers themselves, put the cheapest new B70 at $1,499.99 for a Sparkle blower model at Micro Center on October 27, with ASRock's Creator at $1,600 and Intel's reference card at $1,700 at the same chain.

That is still 58% above launch, and it is moving quickly. The same tracker logged a $1,280 floor on October 24, so the cheapest store-sold B70 rose by 17% in three days. B&H, which sells its own stock, now lists Intel's reference card at $2,059, which is 117% above the launch price and $280 more than in August.

Memory costs explain only part of the jump

The backdrop is the AI-driven memory crunch that has reportedly put Nvidia's RTX 50 Super refresh on hold and pushed up prices across the graphics market. PC Partner, the company behind Zotac and Inno3D, said in August that rising graphics memory prices will lead to a "substantial increase" in card costs in the second half of 2026.

Memory alone does not account for the B70's markup, though. TrendForce, citing MyDrivers, reported in July that consumer GDDR6 spot prices had tripled from around $2.50 per gigabyte in fall 2025 to roughly $7.50. That, if one does the math, adds about $160 to the cost of the B70's 32GB. The remainder looks like a scarcity premium, and the available data isn't enough to show how it's split among Intel, its board partners, distributors, and resellers.

AMD's Radeon AI Pro R9700 offers a rough control. It carries the same 32GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, launched at $1,299 before most of the memory spike and now starts at $1,700 at Micro Center, a 31% increase. If memory were the whole story, both cards should have risen by similar dollar amounts. Instead, the B70's floor has risen about $150 more, and its lead over AMD's card has narrowed from $350 to $200.

The 128GB home AI rig is the real casualty

The buyer who loses out is the one the B70 seemed built for: someone stacking cards to run large models at home. StorageReview's review in July concluded that "the hardware is impressive; the pricing is even more so," noting that four B70 units delivered 128GB of VRAM for roughly $3,800 at list. That math changes to about $6,000 or more when you consider the lowest prices for those GPUs.

The cut-down Arc Pro B65 offers some relief. It keeps the B70's 32GB and 608 GB/s of bandwidth but drops to 20 Xe cores, and Tom's Hardware's launch coverage suggested it could appeal to "local LLM enthusiasts chasing memory capacity and bandwidth on the cheap." It hasn't escaped the price increases either. ASRock's version debuted at Newegg for $909.99 in June and now starts at $1,199.99, though that is still $300 below the B70's floor.

Intel has not announced any change to the B70's suggested starting price of $949. With forecasts reporting that the memory shortage could last until 2028, anyone waiting for the card to return to that figure may be waiting a long time.