Nvidia kickstarted the next generation of AI with the unveiling of the Nvidia Rubin platform, comprising six new chips designed to deliver one incredible AI supercomputer.
It’s an interesting marketing strategy, surely meant to scare competitors, but it’s worth noting that the chips aren’t coming out until the second half of the year. Nvidia made the revelation at CES 2026, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.
For sure, it has assembled one of the biggest tech ecosystems of all time, and everyone will need the extra time to get ready for what should be a big change in AI capabilities. Nvidia’s solutions are used by the vast majority of Fortune Global 500 companies.
At his keynote at CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Vera Rubin is in full production for its launch later this years. There are 1,152 GPUs in a Rubin pod, with 88 custom Olympus cores and 227 billion transistors, Huang said. Why is it necessary? This can do something like handle the training of the next gigantic large language models.
Nvidia said Rubin sets a new standard for building, deploying and securing the world’s largest and most advanced AI systems at the lowest cost to accelerate mainstream AI adoption.
The Rubin platform uses extreme codesign across the six chips — the Nviia Vera CPU,
Nvidia Rubin GPU, Nvidia NVLink 6 Switch, Nvidia ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, Nvidia
BlueField-4 DPU and Nvidia Spectrum-6 Ethernet Switch — to slash training time and
inference token costs.
“Rubin arrives at exactly the right moment, as AI computing demand for both training and
inference is going through the roof,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in a statement. “With our annual cadence of delivering a new generation of AI supercomputers — and extreme codesign across six new chips — Rubin takes a giant leap toward the next frontier of AI.”
Named for Vera Florence Cooper Rubin — the trailblazing American astronomer whose
discoveries transformed humanity’s understanding of the universe — the Rubin platform
features the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale solution and the Nvidia HGX Rubin
NVL8 system.
The Rubin platform introduces five innovations, including the latest generations of Nvidia
NVLink interconnect technology, Transformer Engine, Confidential Computing and RAS
Engine, as well as the Nvidia Vera CPU. Nvidia said these breakthroughs will accelerate agentic AI, advanced reasoning and massive-scale mixture-of-experts (MoE) model inference at up to one tenth the cost per token of the Nvidia Blackwell platform, the highly successful predecssor of Rubin. Compared with its predecessor, the Nvidia Rubin platform trains MoE models with one-fourth the number of GPUs to accelerate AI adoption.
Broad Ecosystem Support
Among the world’s leading AI labs, cloud service providers, computer makers and startups
expected to adopt Rubin are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic, Black Forest Labs,
Cisco, Cohere, CoreWeave, Cursor, Dell Technologies, Google, Harvey, HPE, Lambda,
Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Nebius, Nscale, OpenAI, OpenEvidence, Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure (OCI), Perplexity, Runway, Supermicro, Thinking Machines Lab and xAI.
In a quote parade that is a who’s who of AI tech, Nvidia noted the following quotes:
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement, “Intelligence scales with compute. When we add more compute, models get more capable, solve harder problems and make a bigger impact for people. The Nvidia Rubin platform helps us keep scaling this progress so advanced intelligence benefits everyone.”
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said in a statement, “The efficiency gains in the Nvidia Rubin platform represent the kind of infrastructure progress that enables longer memory, better reasoning and more reliable outputs. Our collaboration with Nvidia helps power our safety research and our frontier models.”
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, said in a statement, “Nvidia’s Rubin platform promises to deliver the step-change in performance and efficiency required to deploy the most advanced models to billions of people.”
Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, said in a statement, “💚🎉🚀 🤖 NVIDIA Rubin will be a rocket engine for AI. If you want to train and deploy frontier models at scale, this is the infrastructure you use — and Rubin will remind the world that Nvidia is the gold standard. 💚🎉🚀 🤖”
Satya Nadella, executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said in a statement, “We are building the world’s most powerful AI superfactories to serve any workload, anywhere, with maximum performance and efficiency. With the addition of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, we will empower developers and organizations to create, reason and scale in entirely new ways.”
Mike Intrator, CEO of CoreWeave, said in a statement, “We built CoreWeave to help pioneers accelerate their innovations with the unmatched performance of our purpose-built AI platform, matching the right technology to the right workloads as they evolve. The Nvidia Rubin platform represents an important advancement for reasoning, agentic and large scale inference workloads, and we’re excited to add it to our platform. With CoreWeave Mission Control as the operating standard, we can integrate new capabilities quickly and run them reliably at production scale, working in close partnership with Nvidia.”
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, said in a statement, “AWS and Nvidia have been driving cloud AI innovation together for more than 15 years. The Nvidia Rubin platform on AWS represents our continued commitment to delivering cutting-edge AI infrastructure that gives customers unmatched choice and flexibility. By combining Nvidia’s advanced AI technology with AWS’s proven scale, security and comprehensive AI services, customers can build, train and deploy their most demanding AI applications faster and more cost effectively — accelerating their path from experimentation to production at any scale.”
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a statement, “We are proud of our deep and long-standing relationship with Nvidia. To meet the substantial customer demand we see for Nvidia GPUs, we are focused on providing the best possible environment for their hardware on Google Cloud. Our collaboration will continue as we bring the impressive capabilities of the Rubin platform to our customers, offering them the scale and performance needed to advance the boundaries of AI.”
Clay Magouyrk, CEO of Oracle, said in a statement, “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a hyperscale cloud built for the highest performance, and together with Nvidia, we’re pushing the boundaries of what customers can build and scale with AI. With gigascale AI factories powered by the Nvidia Vera Rubin architecture, OCI is giving customers the infrastructure foundation they need to push the limits of model training, inference and real-world AI impact.”
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, said in a statement, “The Nvidia Rubin platform represents a major leap forward in AI infrastructure. By integrating Rubin into the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, we’re building infrastructure that can handle massive token volumes and multistep reasoning while delivering the performance and resiliency that enterprises
and neoclouds need to deploy AI at scale.”
Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, said in a statement, “AI is reshaping not just workloads but the very foundations of IT, requiring us to reimagine every layer of infrastructure from the network to the compute. With the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform, HPE is building the next generation of secure, AI-native infrastructure, turning data into intelligence and enabling enterprises to become true AI factories.”
Yuanqing Yang, CEO of Lenovo, said in a statement, “Lenovo is embracing the next-generation Nvidia Rubin platform, leveraging our Neptune liquid-cooling solution as well as our global scale, manufacturing efficiency and service reach, to help enterprises build AI factories that serve as intelligent, accelerated engines for insight and innovation. Together, we’re architecting an AI-driven future where efficient, secure AI becomes the standard for every organization.”
Engineered to Scale Intelligence
Agentic AI and reasoning models, along with state-of-the-art video generation workloads, are redefining the limits of computation. Multistep problem-solving requires models to
process, reason and act across long sequences of tokens. Designed to serve the demands
of complex AI workloads, the Rubin platform’s five groundbreaking technologies include:
● Sixth-Generation Nvidia NVLink: Delivers the fast, seamless GPU-to-GPU communication required for today’s massive MoE models. Each GPU offers 3.6TB/s of bandwidth, while the Vera Rubin NVL72 rack provides 260TB/s — more bandwidth than the entire internet. With built-in, in-network compute to speed collective operations, as well as new features for enhanced serviceability and resiliency, Nvidia NVLink 6 switch enables faster, more efficient AI training and inference at scale.
● Nvidia Vera CPU: Designed for agentic reasoning, Nvidia Vera is the most power‑efficient CPU for large-scale AI factories. The Nvidia CPU is built with 88 Nvidia custom Olympus cores, full Armv9.2 compatibility and ultrafast NVLink-C2C connectivity. Vera delivers exceptional performance, bandwidth and industry‑leading efficiency to support a full range of modern data center workloads.
● Nvidia Rubin GPU: Featuring a third-generation Transformer Engine with
hardware-accelerated adaptive compression, Rubin GPU delivers 50 petaflops of
NVFP4 compute for AI inference.
● Third-Generation Nvidia Confidential Computing: Vera Rubin NVL72 is the first
rack-scale platform to deliver Nvidia Confidential Computing — which maintains data security across CPU, GPU and NVLink domains — protecting the world’s largest proprietary models, training and inference workloads.
● Second-Generation RAS Engine: The Rubin platform — spanning GPU, CPU and NVLink — features real-time health checks, fault tolerance and proactive maintenance to maximize system productivity. The rack’s modular, cable-free tray design enables up to 18x faster assembly and servicing than Blackwell.
AI-Native Storage and Secure, Software-Defined Infrastructure
Nvidia Rubin introduces Nvidia Inference Context Memory Storage Platform, a new class of AI-native storage infrastructure designed to scale inference context at gigascale. Powered by Nvidia BlueField-4, the platform enables efficient sharing and reuse of key
value cache data across AI infrastructure, improving responsiveness and throughput while
enabling predictable, power-efficient scaling of agentic AI.
As AI factories increasingly adopt bare-metal and multi-tenant deployment models, maintaining strong infrastructure control and isolation becomes essential.
BlueField-4 also introduces Advanced Secure Trusted Resource Architecture, or ASTRA, a
system-level trust architecture that gives AI infrastructure builders a single, trusted control point to securely provision, isolate and operate large-scale AI environments without compromising performance.
With AI applications evolving toward multi-turn agentic reasoning, AI-native organizations
must manage and share far larger volumes of inference context across users, sessions and services.
Different Forms for Different Workloads
Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 offers a unified, secure system that combines 72 Nvidia Rubin
GPUs, 36 Nvidia Vera CPUs, Nvidia NVLink 6, Nvidia ConnectX-9 SuperNICs and Nvidia
BlueField-4 DPUs.
Nvidia will also offer the Nvidia HGX Rubin NVL8 platform, a server board that links eight
Rubin GPUs through NVLink to support x86-based generative AI platforms. The HGX Rubin
NVL8 platform accelerates training, inference and scientific computing for AI and high
performance computing workloads.
Nvidia DGX SuperPOD serves as a reference for deploying Rubin-based systems at
scale, integrating either Nvidia DGX Vera Rubin NVL72 or DGX Rubin NVL8 systems with
Nvidia BlueField-4 DPUs, Nvidia ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, Nvidia InfiniBand networking
and Nvidia Mission Control software.
Next-Generation Ethernet Networking
Advanced Ethernet networking and storage are components of AI infrastructure critical to
keeping data centers running at full speed, improving performance and efficiency, and
lowering costs.
Nvidia Spectrum-6 Ethernet is the next generation of Ethernet for AI networking, built to
scale Rubin-based AI factories with higher efficiency and greater resilience, and enabled by 200G SerDes communication circuitry, co-packaged optics and AI-optimized fabrics.
Built on the Spectrum-6 architecture, Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics co-packaged optical
switch systems deliver 10x greater reliability and 5x longer uptime for AI applications while
achieving 5x better power efficiency, maximizing performance per watt compared with
traditional methods. Spectrum-XGS Ethernet technology, part of the Spectrum-X Ethernet
platform, enables facilities separated by hundreds of kilometers and more to function as a
single AI environment.
Together, these innovations define the next generation of the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet platform, engineered with extreme codesign for Rubin to enable massive-scale AI factories and pave the way for future million-GPU environments.
Rubin Readiness
Nvidia Rubin-based products will be available from partners the second half of 2026.
Among the first cloud providers to deploy Vera Rubin-based instances in 2026 will be AWS,
Google Cloud, Microsoft and OCI, as well as Nvidia Cloud Partners CoreWeave, Lambda,
Nebius and Nscale.
Microsoft will deploy Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems as part of next generation AI data centers, including future Fairwater AI super factory sites.
Designed to deliver unprecedented efficiency and performance for training and inference
workloads, the Rubin platform will provide the foundation for Microsoft’s next-generation
cloud AI capabilities. Microsoft Azure will offer a tightly optimized platform enabling
customers to accelerate innovation across enterprise, research and consumer applications.
CoreWeave will integrate Nvidia Rubin-based systems into its AI cloud platform beginning in the second half of 2026. CoreWeave is built to operate multiple architectures side by
side, enabling customers to bring Rubin into their environments, where it will deliver the
greatest impact across training, inference and agentic workloads.
Together with Nvidia, CoreWeave will help AI pioneers take advantage of Rubin’s advancements in reasoning and MoE models, while continuing to deliver the performance,
operational reliability and scale required for production AI across the full lifecycle with
CoreWeave Mission Control.
In addition, Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro are expected to deliver a wide range
of servers based on Rubin products.
AI labs including Anthropic, Black Forest, Cohere, Cursor, Harvey, Meta, Mistral AI, OpenAI,
OpenEvidence, Perplexity, Runway, Thinking Machines Lab and xAI are looking to the
Nvidia Rubin platform to train larger, more capable models and to serve long-context,
multimodal systems at lower latency and cost than with prior GPU generations.
Infrastructure software and storage partners AIC, Canonical, Cloudian, DDN, Dell, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Supermicro, SUSE, VAST Data and
WEKA are working with Nvidia to design next-generation platforms for Rubin infrastructure.
The Rubin platform marks Nvidia’s third-generation rack-scale architecture, with more
than 80 Nvidia MGX ecosystem partners.
To unlock this density, Red Hat today announced an expanded collaboration with Nvidia to deliver a complete AI stack optimized for the Nvidia Rubin platform with Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI.