Asus has joined the tiny club of companies selling a desktop AI workstation that costs as much as a house deposit, or a very expensive car, depending on your taste in bad financial decisions. The new ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 is a tower PC on the outside and a serious AI box on the inside, built around Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell Ultra superchip and fitted with 748 GB of total memory.
That memory figure is the real headline here. Asus says the system combines 496 GB of LPDDR5X with 252 GB of HBM3e, giving buyers enough headroom to run and process large AI models on a single workstation without immediately reaching for a data-center budget. The machine is already listed with US retailers at $100,000, while buyers in the UK are staring at £117,600.
Grace Blackwell Ultra inside a tower PC
Under the hood, the ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 uses Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell Ultra, which pairs a 72-core ARM Neoverse V2 CPU with a Blackwell Ultra graphics accelerator. That is a very different proposition from the usual ”workstation” label slapped onto a premium office machine with a stronger GPU and a prayer.
- 72-core ARM Neoverse V2 processor
- 496 GB LPDDR5X memory at 396 GB/s
- 252 GB HBM3e memory at 7.1 TB/s
- 1600 W power supply
Asus says the cooling system can hold peak performance under sustained load without forcing the CPU or graphics chip to throttle. That claim matters more than it sounds, because high-end AI hardware lives or dies by how long it can keep chewing through workloads before heat starts shaving off performance.
Ports are where the compromise shows
For a machine this expensive, the connectivity list is surprisingly restrained. There is no USB4 and no Thunderbolt, which feels stingy on a workstation aimed at serious users, even if the rest of the spec sheet looks like it escaped from a lab.
- Eight USB 3.2 ports at 10 Gbit/s
- One USB 2.0 port
- Two Ethernet ports at 10 Gbit/s
- Three PCIe 5.0 slots
- Four M.2 slots for SSDs
The machine ships with Ubuntu for now, with Windows support promised later. That makes the target audience pretty clear: people who care more about local AI throughput than whether the desktop icon theme matches the office wallpaper. Given how Nvidia’s AI hardware has been drifting from servers into premium workstations, Asus is betting that a few wealthy buyers would rather skip the cloud bill entirely.
Who should buy this AI workstation?
At $100,000, this is not a mainstream desktop with an aggressive spec sheet. It is a specialized AI workstation for buyers who need giant models to run locally and can justify the price by comparing it with racks of server gear instead of consumer PCs. The weird part is not that it exists; it is that Asus is willing to sell it in a tower case and call that practical.
If this thing sells at all, expect it to be to labs, boutique AI teams, and enterprises that want one room-temperature monster instead of a server closet. The more interesting question is whether the stripped-back port selection and the promised Windows support arrive fast enough to make it feel finished, or whether Asus has shipped the hardware flex first and the convenience layer later.