Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform is already in “full production,” revealing new details at CES in Las Vegas about hardware that he claims can deliver five times more AI computing than previous Nvidia systems.
Rubin is expected to arrive later this year and is aimed squarely at the fastest-growing part of the AI business, helping to generate results from trained models.
Huang said Rubin’s flagship server will include 72 Nvidia graphics processing units and 36 central processors, and will be able to connect to larger “pods” containing more than 1,000 Rubin chips.
Much of the conversation revolved around efficiency. Huang said Rubin systems could improve the efficiency of generating AI “tokens” (the basic units produced by language models) by about 10 times, with the help of a type of proprietary data that the company wants the broader industry to adopt. He added that the jump in performance comes despite just a 1.6-fold increase in the number of transistors.
Huang described AI development as a race in which faster processing means reaching the next milestone sooner, forcing competitors to spend aggressively on chips, networks and storage.
How bitcoin miners are affected
That same infrastructure race has also been reshaping parts of the cryptocurrency market.
Bitcoin miners have increasingly marketed themselves as power and rack space operators rather than pure crypto operations, offering their power contracts, cooling capacity, and data center footprints to AI customers.
Hosting AI workloads can generate more stable cash flows than bitcoin mining during down cycles, especially for companies with cheap power, existing sites, and cooling capacity.
But the rise of AI also raises the bar. Data center space is becoming a premium asset, with hyperscalers, cloud companies and AI startups bidding for the best sites.
That can raise rents, equipment costs and financial hurdles for smaller miners. In other words, miners that look like infrastructure companies stand to win, while those that rely purely on mining margins face a tougher 2026.
Meanwhile, Nvidia also highlighted new network switches that use a connection method called packed optics, a key technology for linking 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.
