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While batting away deepfakes, Nvidia's GTC DC show showed off the superchip platform that will power next-generation data centers: Vera Rubin. This single-board system that combines an 88-core Vera CPU with twin Rubin GPUs will be the backbone of Nvidia's 2026 strategy to continue powering the AI revolution, and its next trillion dollars in valuation.
"This is the next-generation Rubin," CEO Jensen Huang said at GTC. "While we are shipping GB300, we are preparing Rubin to be in production this time next year, maybe slightly earlier. This is just an incredibly beautiful computer," with 100 Petaflops of FP4 performance for AI.
Although Nvidia is facing some skepticism over its performance claims of late, there's no denying that Vera Rubin will be the most powerful "Superchip" ever made when it hits mass production in 2026. It's built using next-generation architectures for Nvidia's CPU and GPU designs, and more than doubles the number of CPU cores over the current-generation GB200 Grace Blackwell flagship. Each Rubin GPU has access to 288GB of HBM4 memory, with the GPUs and CPUs linked together using an enhanced NVLINK-C2C with increased throughput, as per VideoCardz.
All of that equates to a huge increase in performance over existing Grace Blackwell systems that Nvidia has been hyping so much in its big AI data center deals this year. The full NVL144 system will be able to offer 3.6 Exaflops FP4 inference and 1.2 Exaflops FP8 in training workloads. That works out to around 3.3 times faster than Nvidia's GB300 NVL72 platform.
As if that wasn't enough, Nvidia teased what's coming after what's coming next, in the form of Rubin Ultra NVL576. Slated to debut sometime in the first of 2027, the super-sized version of Vera Rubin would have more GPUs, a terabyte of HBM4e memory, and up to four times the performance of the standard Vera Rubin configuration.
Nvidia is bringing graphics card FOMO to the data center space in dramatic fashion. Not only is it promising something really exciting just next year, but get your investor wallets ready because there's going to be even more capable and expensive hardware coming after that. The question is, how long can this gravy train keep rolling?