Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform is already in “full production,” revealing fresh details at the CES technology event in Las Vegas about hardware he says can deliver five times the artificial intelligence of Nvidia’s previous systems.
Expected to arrive later this year, Rubin is aimed squarely at the fastest-growing part of the AI business, helping to deliver output from trained models.
Huang said Rubin’s flagship server will include 72 of Nvidia’s graphics processing units and 36 central processors and can be connected to larger “pods” containing more than 1,000 Rubin chips.
Much of the talk was about efficiency. Huang said Rubin’s systems could improve the efficiency of generating AI “tokens” — the basic units produced by language models — by about 10 times, helped by a proprietary type of data the company wants the wider industry to adopt. He added that the performance jump comes despite only a 1.6-fold increase in transistor count.
Huang described AI development as a race where faster processing means reaching the next milestone faster, forcing competitors to spend aggressively on chips, networking and storage.
How bitcoin miners are affected
The same infrastructure race has also reshaped parts of the crypto market.
Bitcoin miners have increasingly marketed themselves as power-and-rackspace operators rather than pure crypto plays, pitching their energy contracts, cooling capacity and data center footprints to AI clients.
Hosting AI workloads can generate more stable cash flow than bitcoin mining during downturn cycles, especially for businesses with cheap power, existing sites and cooling capacity.
But the AI boom is also raising the bar. Data center space is becoming a prime asset, with prime sites being bid up by hyperscalers, cloud companies and AI startups.
That can raise rents, equipment costs and financing hurdles for smaller miners. In other words, miners that look like infrastructure companies may gain, while those that rely on pure mining margins face a tougher 2026.
Meanwhile, Nvidia also highlighted new network switches that use a connection method called co-packaged optics, a key technology for connecting thousands of machines into a single system.
The company said CoreWeave will be among the first to receive Rubin systems, and expects Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet to adopt them as well.
