Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Nvidia announced the next generation of its artificial intelligence processors on Sunday, a surprise move less than three months after its most recent launch.
At the Computex conference in Taipei, the chipmaker’s CEO Jensen Huang unveiled ‘Rubin’, the successor to its ‘Blackwell’ chips for data centers, which are currently in production after being announced in March.
The unexpected move to unveil its next wave of products before Blackwell has even started shipping to customers shows how the world’s most valuable chipmaker is racing to cement its dominance in AI processors, propelling it into the ranks of The world’s most valuable companies have ended up.
“A new era of computing is dawning,” Huang said, as Nvidia also unveiled new AI chip deals with PC makers.
Rubin is expected to start shipping in 2026 and promises improved energy efficiency as the Silicon Valley-based company tries to address concerns that Big Tech’s expansion of AI data centers is putting pressure on the energy grid in some regions.
The announcement lacked detail, but Huang said Nvidia was working on a “one-year cadence” of building new AI platforms.
Nvidia’s pace of innovation has become paramount to the broader stock market as traders bet on whether the massive AI-driven rally of a handful of Big Tech companies can continue.
The chipmaker added about $350 billion to its market cap after reporting surging revenue growth, and the company is closing in on Apple to become the most valuable U.S. company after Microsoft.
While Nvidia today sells the majority of AI chips needed to train large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT, the company faces increasing competition from AMD and Intel, as well as custom chips developed by cloud computing providers, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Nvidia’s Blackwell chip is being rolled out barely a year after the unveiling of the current generation of “Hopper” chips.
The company also announced a new Vera Arm-based central processing unit on Sunday as Nvidia looks to make more chips used in AI data centers.
CPUs, a market dominated by Intel and AMD, have traditionally been the workhorse of any computer, but Huang is looking to reshape the server market around its AI chips as artificial intelligence takes on a growing share of data center workloads.
Nvidia started making graphics processing units more than 30 years ago, which acted as sidekicks for Intel CPUs in video game PCs. But more than fifteen years ago, Huang realized that the technology in his GPUs was also suitable for other data-intensive computing tasks, such as AI.
The company is now looking to boost its PC chip business by capitalizing on its dominance in AI chips for data centers.
Huang also announced deals on Sunday with two PC makers, Asus and MSI, which will launch machines that use Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics processing units to support a range of AI tasks, from running digital assistants to video editing and encoding.
“Your future laptop will be constantly helping you in the background,” says Huang. “The PC will run apps enhanced by AI, from writing and photo editing to digital humans that are AIs,” Huang said.
Nvidia has not indicated when the Asus and MSI laptops will go on sale.
A range of PC manufacturers and component suppliers are expected to use the Computex event to make announcements and position themselves as beneficiaries of an expected “AI PC” wave.
Microsoft recently unveiled a range of AI-enhanced PCs and tablets equipped with the Copilot assistant tool powered by Qualcomm’s chips, which will launch later this month. Microsoft has said it expects to include Nvidia chips and AMD’s Radeon graphics chips in its PCs in the future.
PC sales have fallen since the pandemic, but analysts expect that when demand rebounds, companies will increasingly opt for AI PCs with powerful chips to run AI applications, rather than relying solely on the cloud.
“AI PCs will bring the most exciting innovation to the PC industry in the last two to three decades, since the creation of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note last month.
They said running AI applications on devices would be cheaper and more flexible than in the cloud and would also have data privacy benefits. By 2028, AI PCs will make up about 65 percent of PC shipments, up from 2 percent this year, Morgan Stanley predicted.