On Monday, ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, Huang officially introduced the Vera Rubin architecture, which is now in production and expected to ramp up in volume in the second half of the year. This move follows a blockbuster year for its Blackwell chip, as demand for AI infrastructure continued to surge.
In a press briefing ahead of Huang’s keynote, Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI infrastructure solutions, described Vera Rubin as “six chips that make one AI supercomputer.”
“Vera Rubin is designed to address this fundamental challenge that we have: The amount of computation necessary for AI is skyrocketing,” Huang told the audience during a presentation at the CES.
Huang added that compared to the Blackwell model, Rubin marks a leap in performance, with more than triple the speed, could run inference five times faster, and can deliver significantly more inference compute per watt of energy.
Rubin was first announced in 2024 and has been slated to replace Blackwell ever since. The early debut comes months ahead of the late-2026 timeline Nvidia had previously projected.
Named after astronomer Vera Rubin, who discovered the existence of dark matter, Nvidia said in a press release that the architecture is designed to support more complex, agent-style AI workloads, as well as more networking and data movement.
The Rubin systems are already lined up for deployment across much of the cloud industry. Nvidia said partners, including Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, Anthropic, alongside the upcoming Doudna system at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, all plan to use the new platform.
The accelerated launch comes shortly after Nvidia reported record data center revenue, up 66% from a year earlier, driven largely by demand for Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs. Those chips have become a benchmark for the current AI boom are widely seen as a test of whether spending on AI infrastructure is sustainable.
Huang has previously estimated that between $3 trillion and $4 trillion could be spent globally on AI infrastructure over the next five years. Nvidia said products and services built on the Rubin platform will begin rolling out from partners in the second half of 2026.
