.jpg "The Best Time to Drink Coffee for Productivity (and When Not To)")
Nvidia is kicking off 2026 with the early launch of its new Vera Rubin computing platform, following a record-breaking year for the Rubin GPU’s predecessor Blackwell, fueled by the AI boom (or bubble).
During a press briefing ahead of today’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.”
Those six chips include the Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6th-gen switch, Connect-X9 NIC, BlueField4 DPU, and Spectrum-X 102.4T CPO. The platform will support 3rd-generation confidential computing and, according to Nvidia, will be the first rack-scale trusted computing platform.
Nvidia claims the Rubin GPU is capable of delivering five times as much AI training compute as Blackwell. The Vera Rubin architecture as whole can train a large “mixture of experts” (MOE) AI model in the same amount of time as Blackwell while using a quarter of the GPUs and at one-seventh the token cost.
The Rubin launch was originally expected for late this year. Its early arrival today comes just a couple of months after Nvidia reported record high data center revenue, up 66 percent over the prior year. That growth was driven by demand for Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra GPUs, which have set a high bar for Rubin’s success and served as a bellwether for the “AI bubble”. Products and services running on Rubin will be available from Nvidia’s partners starting in the second half of 2026.
