Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says that the company’s next-generation AI superchip platform, Vera Rubin, is on schedule to begin arriving to customers later this year. “Today, I can tell you that Vera Rubin is in full production,” Huang said during a press event on Monday at the annual CES technology trade show in Las Vegas.
Rubin will cut the cost of running AI models to about one-tenth of Nvidia’s current leading chip system, Blackwell, the company told analysts and journalists during a call on Sunday. Nvidia also said Rubin can train certain large models using roughly one-fourth as many chips as Blackwell requires. Taken together, those gains could make advanced AI systems significantly cheaper to operate and make it harder for Nvidia’s customers to justify moving away from its hardware.
Nvidia said on the call that two of its existing partners, Microsoft and CoreWeave, will be among the first companies to begin offering services powered by Rubin chips later this year. Two major AI data centers that Microsoft is currently building in Georgia and Wisconsin will eventually include thousands of Rubin chips, Nvidia added. Some of Nvidia’s partners have started running their next-generation AI models on early Rubin systems, the company said.
The semiconductor giant also said it’s working with Red Hat, which makes open source enterprise software for banks, automakers, airlines, and government agencies, to offer more products that will run on the new Rubin chip system.
Nvidia’s latest chip platform is named after Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who reshaped how scientists understand the properties of galaxies. The system includes six different chips, including the Rubin GPU and a Vera CPU, both of which are built using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s 3-nanometer fabrication process and the most advanced bandwidth memory technology available. Nvidia’s sixth-generation interconnect and switching technologies link the various chips together.
Each part of this chip system is “completely revolutionary and the best of its kind,” Huang proclaimed during the company’s CES press conference.
Nvidia has been developing the Rubin system for years, and Huang first announced the chips were coming during a keynote speech in 2024. Last year, the company said that systems built on Rubin would begin arriving in the second half of 2026.
It’s unclear exactly what Nvidia means by saying that Vera Rubin is in “full production.” Typically, production for chips this advanced—which Nvidia is building with its longtime partner TSMC—starts at low volume while the chips go through testing and validation and ramps up at a later stage.
Source: www.wired.com
