Nvidia announces Blackwell Ultra and Rubin AI chips
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrives to attend the opening ceremony of Siliconware Precision Industries Co. (SPIL)’s Tan Ke Plant site in Taichung, Taiwan Jan. 16, 2025.
Ann Wang | Reuters
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.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Vera Rubin
Nvidia expects to start shipping systems on its next-generation GPU family in the second half of 2026.
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.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, March 18, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Blackwell Ultra
Nvidia also announced new versions of its Blackwell family of chips that it calls Blackwell Ultra.
That chip will be able to produce more tokens per second, which means that the chip can generate more content in the same amount of time as its predecessor, the company said in a briefing.
Nvidia says that means that cloud providers can use Blackwell Ultra to offer a premium AI service for time-sensitive applications, allowing them to make as much as 50 times the revenue from the new chips as the Hopper generation, which shipped in 2023.
Blackwell Ultra will come in a version with two paired to an Nvidia Arm CPU, called GB300, and a version with just the GPU, called B300. It will also come in versions with eight GPUs in a single server blade and a rack version with 72 Blackwell chips.
The top four cloud companies have deployed three times the number of Blackwell chips as Hopper chips, Nvidia said.
DeepSeek
China’s DeepSeek R1 model may have scared Nvidia investors when it was released in January, but Nvidia has embraced the software. The chipmaker will use the model to benchmark several of its new products.
Many AI observers said that DeepSeek’s model, which reportedly required fewer chips than models made in the U.S., threatened Nvidia’s business.
But Huang said earlier this year that DeepSeek was actually a good sign for Nvidia. That’s because DeepSeek uses a process called “reasoning,” which requires more computing power to provide users better answers.
The new Blackwell Ultra chips are better for reasoning models, Nvidia said.
It’s developed its chips to more efficiently do inference, so when new reasoning models require more computing power at the time of deployment, Nvidia’s chips will be able to handle it.
“In the last 2 to 3 years, a major breakthrough happened, a fundamental advance in artificial intelligence happened. We call it agentic AI,” Huang said. “It can reason about how to answer or how to solve a problem.”
WATCH: Nvidia kicks off its GTC Conference: The Committee debate how to trade it
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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