Nvidia announced new chips for building and deploying artificial intelligence models at its annual GTC conference on Tuesday. 

CEO Jensen Huang revealed Blackwell Ultra, a family of chips shipping in the second half of this year, as well as Vera Rubin, the company’s next-generation graphics processing unit, or GPU, that is expected to ship in 2026.

Nvidia’s sales are up more than sixfold since its business was transformed by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. That’s because its “big GPUs” have most of the market for developing advanced AI, a process called training.

Software developers and investors are closely watching the company’s new chips to see if they offer enough additional performance and efficiency to convince the company’s biggest end customers — cloud companies including Microsoft, Google and Amazon — to continue spending billions of dollars to build data centers based around Nvidia chips.

“This last year is where almost the entire world got involved. The computational requirement, the scaling law of AI, is more resilient, and in fact, is hyper-accelerated,” Huang said.

Tuesday’s announcements are also a test of Nvidia’s new annual release cadence. The company is striving to announce new chip families on an every-year basis. Before the AI boom, Nvidia released new chip architectures every other year. 

The GTC conference in San Jose, California, is also a show of strength for Nvidia. 

The event, Nvidia’s second in-person conference since the pandemic, is expected to have 25,000 attendees and hundreds of companies discussing the ways they use the company’s hardware for AI. That includes Waymo, Microsoft and Ford, among others. General Motors also announced that it will use Nvidia’s service for its next-generation vehicles.

The chip architecture after Rubin will be named after physicist Richard Feynman, Nvidia said on Tuesday, continuing its tradition of naming chip families after scientists. Nvidia’s Feynman chips are expected to be available in 2028, according to a slide displayed by Huang.

Nvidia will also showcase its other products and services at the event. 

For example, Nvidia announced new laptops and desktops using its chips, including two AI-focused PCs called DGX Spark and DGX Station that will be able to run large AI models such as Llama or DeepSeek. The company also announced updates to its networking parts for tying hundreds or thousands of GPUs together so they work as one, as well as a software package called Dynamo that helps users get the most out of their chips.

The system has two main components: a CPU, called Vera, and a new GPU design, called Rubin. It’s named after astronomer Vera Rubin.

Vera is Nvidia’s first custom CPU design, the company said, and it’s based on a core design they’ve named Olympus. 

Previously when it needed CPUs, Nvidia used an off-the-shelf design from Arm. Companies that have developed custom Arm core designs, such as Qualcomm and Apple, say that they can be more tailored and unlock better performance.

The custom Vera design will be twice as fast as the CPU used in last year’s Grace Blackwell chips, the company said. 

When paired with Vera, Rubin can manage 50 petaflops while doing inference, more than double the 20 petaflops for the company’s current Blackwell chips. Rubin can also support as much as 288 gigabytes of fast memory, which is one of the core specs that AI developers watch.

Nvidia is also making a change to what it calls a GPU. Rubin is actually two GPUs, Nvidia said. 

The Blackwell GPU, which is currently on the market, is actually two separate chips that were assembled together and made to work as one chip.

Starting with Rubin, Nvidia will say that when it combines two or more dies to make a single chip, it will refer to them as separate GPUs. In the second half of 2027, Nvidia plans to release a “Rubin Next” chip that combines four dies to make a single chip, doubling the speed of Rubin, and it will refer to that as four GPUs.

Nvidia said that will come in a rack called Vera Rubin NVL144. Previous versions of Nvidia’s rack were called NVL72.

WATCH: Nvidia kicks off its GTC Conference: The Committee debate how to trade it

The Federal Trade Commission is going after an e-commerce company that allegedly took millions of dollars from consumers as part of a “passive income” scheme, which spun up Amazon storefronts on their behalf and promised “insane returns” that were higher than the stock market.

The FTC said Tuesday it filed a lawsuit against the company, called Click Profit; its co-founders Craig Emslie and Patrick McGeoghean; and two other business associates. It also asked a judge to bar the parties from doing business temporarily.

The case is the latest example of the FTC cracking down on e-commerce “automation” services. These companies launch and manage online storefronts on behalf of clients, who pay money for the services and the promise of earning tens of thousands of dollars in “passive income.” The companies often make extravagant claims about potential earnings and the use of artificial intelligence technology to guarantee profits. Despite their assurances, consumers frequently end up losing money.

Click Profit, which also operated under the names FBALaunch, Automation Industries and PortfolioLaunch, promised investors they would “build you a massively profitable e-commerce store from the ground up” by selling products on Amazon, Walmart and TikTok, according to the FTC.

The company charged consumers between $45,000 to $75,000 for the initial investment, plus an additional $10,000 or more to pay for inventory, the FTC alleged in its complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Click Profit took up to 35% of any profits from their customers’ stores, the complaint states.

The company claimed the business opportunity was “safe, secure and proven to generate wealth,” according to marketing materials referenced in the FTC’s complaint. They posted screenshots of purportedly successful Amazon storefronts, including one they claimed generated product sales of over $540,000 in one month.

Emslie often appeared in TikTok videos and other online ads to pitch prospective consumers. In one ad, he said that “the stock market, real estate or precious metals will never be able to offer you” the level of security offered through investing in Click Profit, according to the FTC’s complaint. Other TikTok videos show him appearing alongside an image of Warren Buffett while “fanning himself” with wads of cash, per the complaint.

Click Profit talked up its expertise by claiming it had product sourcing partnerships with legitimate brands, including Nike, Disney, Dell, Colgate and Marvel, the complaint alleges. It also claimed to have spent $5 million to build a “super computer” and other AI technologies to locate the “most profitable products,” claiming the super computer had generated “around $100 million in sales,” per the complaint.

The company even implied that investors’ online store could be bought out by venture capital firms connected with Click Profit “at a 3-6x multiple,” the FTC alleged.

“In reality, the highly touted AI technology and brand partnerships do not exist, and the promised earnings never materialize,” the FTC said in its complaint.

Amazon suspended or terminated about 95% of Click Profit’s stores after they violated Amazon’s seller policies, the FTC alleged. After accounting for Amazon’s fees, more than one-fifth of Click Profit’s stores on the platform earned no money at all, while another third earned less than $2,500 in gross lifetime sales, the FTC stated.

As a result, most consumers were unable to recoup their investments and “some are saddled with burdensome credit card debt and unsold products,” according to the FTC, which also said that Click Profit often refused to refund victims their investments and threatened them with legal action if they posted publicly about their experience.

One unnamed consumer mentioned in the lawsuit invested “his life’s savings” in Click Profit and was later terminated as a client “with nothing to show for his payments,” the complaint states. He posted a negative review online and was allegedly approached by Emslie’s attorney, who threatened to sue the consumer and “take everything he and his wife owned,” per the complaint.

The consumer took the reviews down, then asked Emslie whether he could receive a partial refund, according to the FTC.

“The attorney told the consumer that Emslie had responded, ‘F*** off,'” the FTC alleged.

Representatives for Emslie and Click Profit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The FTC alleges Click Profit violated the FTC Act, the Consumer Review Fairness Act and the Business Opportunity Rule. It seeks to permanently prohibit Click Profit from doing business, as well as monetary relief for the victims.

Food logistics company GrubMarket said Tuesday that it has raised $50 million in a Series G funding round, valuing the San Francisco-based firm at more than $3.5 billion.

The new round includes Liberty Street Funds, 3Spoke Capital, ROC Venture Group, Portfolia, Pegasus Tech Ventures, Joseph Stone Capital, and other unnamed investors.

“GrubMarket has experienced an incredible acceleration in growth over the last 12 months – our revenues surpassed $2 billion in 2024, and we became the largest private food technology company in the United States, while continuing to maintain a strong and healthy financial bottom line,” founder & CEO Mike Xu said in a statement announcing the funding.

The company, founded in 2014, currently does business with more than 70 countries, serving businesses and consumers in all 50 states plus Canada, and has over 12,000 employees.

Despite a tough macroeconomic environment fueled by uncertainty surrounding tariffs, much of the company’s growth has come through acquisitions. Companies that GrubMarket acquires use its software suite, which includes sales and online ordering features, inventory management, lot traceability, and automated routing and logistics.

The company says the funding will be used to double down on artificial intelligence.

“As our business model is highly sustainable, this funding round was not a necessity, but rather an opportunity to align our valuation with the scale and strength of our business growth, our AI tech innovations, and the significant value we create for the industry,” Xu said.

The company’s Farm-GPT, an analytics tool powered by generative AI that uses real-time and historical pricing data from USDA and proprietary sources, helps farmers and growers maximize profits and optimize crop selection. It also has a broader GrubAssist suite of AI-powered virtual assistants delivering real-time business insights and analysis.

GrubMarket has been named to CNBC’s annual Disruptor 50 list the past two consecutive years, ranked No. 23 in 2024 and No. 41 in 2023.