Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform is already “in full production” and revealed new details about the hardware at CES in Las Vegas, saying it can deliver five times more artificial intelligence computing than Nvidia’s previous systems.
Rubin is scheduled to arrive later this year and is aimed squarely at the fastest growing part of the AI business, helping to provide output from trained models.
Huang said Rubin’s flagship server is equipped with 72 Nvidia 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 the Rubin system can improve the efficiency of generating AI “tokens” (the basic units produced by language models) by about 10 times with the help of a unique type of data that the company hopes to adopt across the broader industry. He added that even though the number of transistors has increased by only 1.6 times, the performance has improved dramatically.
Huang described AI development as a race where faster processing means reaching the next milestone faster, forcing competitors to spend more aggressively on chips, networking and storage.
Impact on Bitcoin miners
The same infrastructure competition is also reshaping parts of the cryptocurrency market.
Bitcoin miners are increasingly promoting themselves as power and rack space operators, selling energy contracts, cooling capacity, and data center footprints to AI customers rather than pure cryptocurrency businesses.
Hosting AI workloads can generate more stable cash flow than Bitcoin mining during downcycles, especially for companies with cheap power, existing sites, and cooling capacity.
However, the AI boom has also raised the bar. Data center space is becoming a valuable asset, and the best sites are bid up by hyperscalers, cloud companies, and AI startups.
This could raise rents, equipment costs and funding hurdles for small miners. In other words, while miners such as infrastructure companies may win, miners that rely on pure mining margins will face an even tougher situation in 2026.
Meanwhile, Nvidia also highlighted a new network switch that uses a connection method called co-packaged optics, a key technology for linking thousands of machines into a single system.
The company said CoreWeave will be one of the first companies to adopt the Rubin system, and it expects Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet to follow suit.