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Nvidia announced the next generation of its artificial intelligence processors on Sunday in a surprise move less than three months after its last launch.
At the Computex conference in Taipei, the chipmaker’s CEO Jensen Huang unveiled “Rubin,” the successor to its “Blackwell” data center chips that are currently in production following the announcement in March.
The unexpected move to unveil the next wave of products before Blackwell even starts shipping to customers shows how the world’s most valuable chipmaker is racing to consolidate its dominance of AI processors, which has catapulted it into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies.
“A new computing age is beginning,” Huang said, as Nvidia also unveiled new AI chip contracts with PC makers.
Due to begin shipping in 2026, Rubin promises improved energy efficiency as the Silicon Valley-based company tries to address concerns that the expansion of Big Tech’s AI data centers is straining the power grid in some regions.
The announcement was light on details, but Huang said Nvidia is working on a “one-year rhythm” of building new AI platforms.
Nvidia’s pace of innovation took on extra weight in the broader stock market as traders bet on whether a huge AI-driven rally in a handful of big tech companies could continue.
The chipmaker added roughly $350 billion to its market capitalization after reporting sharp revenue growth, and the company is closing in on Apple to become the second most valuable U.S. company after Microsoft.
While Nvidia today sells most of the AI ​​chips needed to train large language models such as OpenAI 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 comes barely a year after its current generation of “Hopper” chips were revealed.
The company also announced a new Vera Arm-based central processing unit on Sunday as Nvidia looks to produce more chips that go into AI data centers.
CPUs, in a market dominated by Intel and AMD, are traditionally the lifeblood of any computer, but Huang is trying to reshape the server market around its AI chips as artificial intelligence takes a growing share of data center workloads.
Nvidia started more than 30 years ago with the production of graphics processing units that functioned as a sidekick to Intel processors in video game computers. But more than 15 years ago, Huang realized that the technology inside his GPU was also suitable for other data-intensive computing tasks, such as AI.
The company is now looking to bolster its PC chip business by capitalizing on its dominance in data center AI chips.
Huang also announced deals on Sunday with two PC makers, Asus and MSI, to market machines using Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics processing units to support a range of artificial intelligence tasks, from running digital assistants to video editing and encoding.
“Your future laptop will be constantly helping you in the background,” Huang said. “The computer will run applications that are enhanced by artificial intelligence, from typing, photo editing, to digital humans that are artificial intelligence,” Huang said.
Nvidia did not specify when the Asus and MSI notebooks will go on sale.
A number of PC manufacturers and component providers are expected to use the Computex event to announce that they will be the beneficiaries of the anticipated “AI PC” wave.
Microsoft recently unveiled a range of AI-enhanced PCs and tablets featuring Copilot Assistant, powered by Qualcomm chips, which will launch later this month. Microsoft has said it expects to include Nvidia chips and AMD Radeon graphics chips in its computers in the future.
PC sales have slumped since the pandemic, but analysts expect that as demand recovers, companies will increasingly choose artificial intelligence computers with powerful chips to run AI applications rather than relying solely on the cloud.
“Computers with artificial intelligence will bring the most exciting innovations to the PC industry in 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 privacy benefits. Artificial intelligence computers will make up about 65 percent of PC shipments by 2028, up from 2 percent this year, Morgan Stanley predicted.