Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, displays the new Blackwell GPU chip during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2024.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is expected to reveal details about Rubin, the chipmaker’s next AI graphics processor, on Tuesday at the company’s annual GTC conference.
While other tech companies usually name their products using combinations of inscrutable letters and numbers, most of Nvidia’s most recent GPU architectures have been named after famous women scientists.
Nvidia is naming its next critical AI chip platform after Vera Rubin, an American astronomer.
The company has never explained its naming convention, and hasn’t emphasized the diversity aspect of its choices, but Nvidia’s chip names that highlight women and minority scientists are one of the most visible efforts to honor diversity in the tech industry during a period where diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives are being slashed by the Trump administration.
Rubin discovered a lot of what is known about “dark matter,” a form of matter that could make up a quarter of the matter of the universe and which doesn’t emit light or radiation, and she advocated for women in science throughout her career.
Nvidia has been naming its architectures after scientists since 1998, when its first chips were based on the company’s “Fahrenheit” microarchitecture. It’s part of the company’s culture – Nvidia used to sell an employee-only t-shirt with cartoons of several famous scientists on it.
It’s one of Nvidia’s quirks that has received more attention as it’s risen to become one of the three most-valuable tech companies and one of the most important suppliers to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Tesla and Meta.
Investors want to hear on Tuesday how fast the Rubin chips will be, what configurations it will come in and when it might start shipping.
Before revealing a new architecture, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang usually gives a one-sentence biography of the scientist it’s named after.
“I’d like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU named after David Blackwell, mathematician, game theorist, probability,” Huang said at last year’s GTC conference. “We thought it was a perfect name.”
Rubin is a fitting name for Nvidia’s next chip, which comes as the company tries to solidify the gains it has made in recent years as the leader in AI hardware. “Vera” will refer to Nvidia’s next-generation central processor, and “Rubin” will refer to Nvidia’s new GPU.
FILE PHOTO: World famous astronomer Vera Rubin, 82, in her office at Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, DC on January 14, 2010.
Linda Davidson | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Rubin studied deep space and worked with other scientists to develop better telescopes and instruments that could collect more detailed data about the universe. In 1968, according to a Nova documentary, she started observing the Andromeda galaxy and collecting the data that would upend science’s understanding of our universe.
Her primary claim to fame came after she observed how quickly galaxies rotate.
“The presumption was that the stars near the center of a galaxy would be orbiting very rapidly, and stars at the outside would be going very slowly,” Rubin said in 1987.
But Rubin realized that she was observing that outer stars were moving quickly, contrary to expectations. They weren’t flying out of orbit, which meant that there had to be more mass scientists weren’t observing — confirming the concept of dark matter.
She was acclaimed during her lifetime, published over 100 papers and held three advanced degrees, but she still faced discrimination because of her sex. Early in her career, Rubin wasn’t allowed to collect her own data, and some observatories didn’t allow women, according to the documentary.
Rubin died in 2016. In 2019, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a state-of-the-art telescope in Chile, was named after her. A biography on the federally-funded observatory’s website was edited to remove details about her advocacy for women in science earlier this year, according to ProPublica.
“I hope you will love your work as I love doing astronomy,” Rubin said at a commencement address in 1996. “I hope that you will fight injustice and discrimination in all its guises.”
Rubin isn’t the first woman to be honored with an Nvidia chip named after her.
Before Blackwell, who was the first Black American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip family was Hopper, named after American computer scientist Grace Hopper, who coined the term “bug” to refer to computer glitches. In 2022, Nvidia released its “Ada Lovelace” architecture, named after the British mathematician who pioneered computer algorithms in the 19th century.
The scientist names used to be a secondary naming convention, taking a back seat to the actual product name, and primarily appearing in marketing copy. Nvidia users more frequently referred to the “H100” chip or marketing names for consumer graphics cards like GeForce RTX 3090.
But last year, Huang emphasized that Blackwell wasn’t a single chip, it was a technology platform, and Nvidia increasingly started using the term “Blackwell” to refer to all of the company’s latest-generation AI products, such as its GB200 chip and DGX server racks.
It’s critical for Nvidia that Rubin achieve the same last-name familiarity level as Hopper and Blackwell.
The company’s sales more than doubled in its fiscal 2025, ended January, to $124.62 billion, thanks to durable sales for the company’s Hopper chips and early demand for the company’s Blackwell chips.
In order to keep growth rising, Nvidia needs to deliver a next-generation chip that justifies its cost and improves on the previous generation’s speeds, power efficiency and cost of ownership.
The company has targeted 2026 for a rollout of the Vera chips, according to an investor presentation last fall. In addition to Vera Rubin, Nvidia is expected to discuss Blackwell Ultra, an updated version of its Blackwell chips that analysts expect the company to start selling later this year.
Huang also teased during an earnings call last month that he’ll show the “next click” after Vera Rubin. That architecture will likely be named after a scientist, too.
“These products should excite partners at the conference ranging from Microsoft to Dell to sovereigns, which normally would please investors,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note on Monday.
Tuesday’s keynote will also be a test of Nvidia’s relatively new release cadence, where it strives to reveal new chips on an annual basis. Investors will also want to see whether Nvidia can continue to impress tech critics and developers while releasing new chip families on a faster schedule than it’s used to. Blackwell was announced last March, and its sales started showing up in Nvidia’s October quarter.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address during the Nvidia GTC 2025 at SAP Center on March 18, 2025 in San Jose, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Nvidia said on Tuesday that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion tied to exporting H20 graphics processing units to China and other destinations. The stock slid more than 6% in extended trading.
On April 9, the U.S. government told Nvidia it would require a license to export the chips to China and a handful of other countries, the company said in a filing.
The disclosure is the strongest sign so far that Nvidia’s historic growth could be slowed by increased export restrictions on its chips, which the U.S. government says can be used to create supercomputers for military uses. Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results on May 28.
During President Biden’s administration, the U.S. restricted AI chip exports in 2022 and then updated the rules the following year to prevent the sale of more advanced AI processors. The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the company’s last quarterly earnings call in February that revenue from China had dropped to half of pre-export control levels. Huang warned that competition in China is growing, and for the second straight year, Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual filing.
China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.
Nvidia’s H20 chip is comparable to the H100 and H200 AI chips used in the U.S. and other countries, but it has slower interconnection speeds and bandwidth. It’s based on a previous generation of AI architecture called Hopper introduced in 2022. Nvidia is now focusing on selling its current generation of AI chips, called Blackwell.
DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose competitive AI model R1 unveiled earlier this year upended markets, used H20 chips in its research.
In addition to the existing Chinese export controls, Nvidia also faces new restrictions on what it can export starting next month, under “AI diffusion rules” first proposed by the Biden administration.
Nvidia has argued that further controls on its chips would stifle competition and potentially even erode U.S. competitiveness in technology. The company previously said it moved some of its operations, including testing and distribution, out of China after the 2022 export controls.
At the company’s annual conference last month, when asked about Chinese export controls, Huang said Nvidia works to comply with the law, but he also noted that about half of the world’s AI researchers are from China, and many of those work at U.S.-based AI labs.
Nvidia said in Tuesday’s filing that the U.S. government told the company on Monday that the license requirement for H20 chips would be in effect “for the indefinite future.”
Nvidia shares have dropped 16% this year, largely due to President Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs on top trading partners. While exemptions have been made on various electronics products, including smartphones, computers and semiconductors, Trump and some officials said over the weekend that the reprieve was temporary and part of plans to apply separate tariffs to the sector.
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday following Nvidia’s disclosure. AI chipmaker Broadcom fell almost 4%.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma Inc., after the morning sessions at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 11, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Design software maker Figma said on Tuesday that it has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering.
The confidential filing lands 16 months after the company scrapped a deal to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion due to regulatory pressure in the U.K. The San Francisco startup had originally agreed to the deal 2022. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.
Figma’s software is popular among designers inside companies who need to collaborate on prototypes for websites and apps. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a 2024 tender offer.
“There are two paths that venture-funded startups go down,” Dylan Field, Figma’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Verge last year. “You either get acquired or you go public. And we explored thoroughly the acquisition route.”
The announcement lands at a precarious moment for the tech IPO market, which has been largely dormant since late 2021. The Trump presidency was expected to revive new offerings due to promises of less burdensome regulations.
But after filing their prospectuses with the SEC, fintech company Klarna and online ticket marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs earlier this month following the market turmoil caused by Trump’s announcements on widespread tariffs. Digital banking service Chime, which had filed confidentially with the SEC, also postponed its planned offering.
Turo, a car-sharing service, withdrew its IPO prospectus in February, three years after filing its initial prospectus.
Figma was founded in 2012 and is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Durable Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. The company, which ranked 26th on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2024, had about $600 million in annual revenue as of early last year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning out Instagram in 2018 on concerns about the rising threat of antitrust litigation against Facebook, according to an email presented Tuesday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom.
During Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony in Meta’s antitrust trial with the Federal Trade Commission, lawyers representing the FTC introduced an email from May 2018, in which Zuckerberg appeared to comment on the possibility of separating the photo-sharing app his company purchased in 2012 for $1 billion.
“And i’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email. “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway. This is one more factor we should consider.”
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, when the photo app had 13 employees and Zuckerberg was poised to take his company public in what, at the time, was the largest tech IPO on record. The purchase of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion are at the heart of the blockbuster antitrust trial that kicked off Monday and could last weeks.
The FTC alleges that Meta monopolizes the social networking market, and has argued that the company shouldn’t have been able to complete those acquisitions. The agency is seeking to cleave the apps from Meta as a possible remedy.
Meta disputes the FTC’s allegations and claims the regulator mischaracterizes the competitive landscape and fails to acknowledge a number of rivals like TikTok and Apple’s iMessage, and not merely other apps like Snapchat. Earlier in the trial, the FTC also presented an Oct. 2013 email in which Zuckerberg told other Facebook executives that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel rebuffed his $6 billion offer to buy Snapchat.
Zuckerberg also said in the 2018 email that the company’s “best estimates are that, had Instagram remained independent, it would likely be around the size of Twitter or Snapchat with 300-400 million MAP today, rather than closer to 1 billion.” MAP is short for monthly active people.