Vio Labs

Notes Nvidia No. 08

Nvidia's roadmap from Vera Rubin to Feynman

Published
Reading time
7 minutes

Nvidia's data centre roadmap runs from Blackwell, which still made up most of its revenue in mid 2026, to Vera Rubin, which began shipping in August 2026, then to Rubin Ultra and a generation called Feynman. In March 2025 Nvidia said Rubin Ultra systems were due in the second half of 2027. In the material we checked it has not restated that date since, and it has given no year for Feynman. This explainer uses Nvidia's own announcements up to the end of September 2026 and marks anything that comes from press reports rather than from Nvidia. Announcements made at GTC Berlin on 21 October 2026 are not included.

The Nvidia roadmap at a glance

GenerationStatus by Nvidia's accountKey parts
Blackwell and Blackwell UltraShipping; "the vast majority" of revenue in the quarter to 26 July 2026GB300 NVL72 racks
Vera RubinProduction shipments began August 2026Rubin GPU, Vera CPU, Groq 3 LPU, five rack systems
Rubin CPXAnnounced September 2025 for end of 2026; reportedly dropped128GB GDDR7 context processor
Rubin UltraSystems "due for the second half of 2027" (said in March 2025)Rubin Ultra GPU
FeynmanNamed as the generation after Vera Rubin; no year in the pages we checkedRosa CPU, LP40 LPU, BlueField-5, CX10, Kyber

Blackwell is still the business

Nvidia's CFO commentary for the quarter to 26 July 2026 says Data Center revenue was "driven by the ramp of our Blackwell Ultra infrastructure" and that Blackwell "remains the vast majority of our revenue". A roadmap describes what comes next; the installed base that most cloud customers rent in late 2026 is Blackwell.

Vera Rubin: from six chips to seven

At CES on 5 January 2026, Nvidia said Rubin was "now in full production" as a six-chip platform: the Rubin GPU, Vera CPU, NVLink 6, Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics, ConnectX-9 SuperNIC and BlueField-4 DPU. Nvidia quoted 50 petaflops of NVFP4 inference per Rubin GPU and "AI tokens at one-tenth the cost" of Blackwell. NVFP4 is Nvidia's 4-bit floating point format.

At GTC in San Jose on 16 March 2026, the Vera Rubin press release added a seventh chip, the Groq 3 LPU. Its list of seven is the Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6 Switch, ConnectX-9 SuperNIC, BlueField-4 DPU, Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch and Groq 3 LPU. It named five rack-scale systems:

  • Vera Rubin NVL72 GPU racks
  • Vera CPU racks
  • Groq 3 LPX racks
  • BlueField-4 STX storage racks
  • Spectrum-6 SPX Ethernet racks

Nvidia's claims for the platform, against Blackwell, are training large mixture-of-experts models "with one-fourth the number of GPUs" and "up to 10x higher inference throughput per watt at one-tenth the cost per token". Those are vendor figures. In MLPerf Inference v6.1, an industry benchmark with a common test format, Nvidia submitted Vera Rubin NVL72 in the preview category and on 16 September 2026 reported up to 2.5x the throughput of GB300 NVL72 on DeepSeek-R1 and up to 3.7x on Qwen3-VL. Preview results are not the same as results on generally available systems.

At Computex, Nvidia described Vera Rubin NVL72 as 36 Vera CPUs and 72 Rubin GPUs, in a rack architecture with 100% liquid cooling designed for 45C inlet water. It said the platform was being ramped by hundreds of supply chain partners, 150 of them in Taiwan, across more than 350 factories in 30 countries.

What is actually shipping

On Nvidia's call of 26 August 2026, as transcribed by The Motley Fool, chief financial officer Colette Kress said "We commenced production shipments of Vera Rubin earlier this month" and that she expected Vera Rubin to account "for about 20% of data center revenue" in the quarter ending October 2026. The results release named CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Nebius as partners running racks, and said Groq 3 LPX was in full production.

The Vera CPU also ships on its own. It has 88 Nvidia-designed Olympus cores, up to 1.2 TB/s of LPDDR5X memory bandwidth and 1.8 TB/s NVLink-C2C links to GPUs, and Nvidia builds standalone racks of 256 Vera CPUs. In March Nvidia said it would be available from partners in the second half of 2026.

Memory sits underneath all of this. SK hynix showed its 12-layer 36GB HBM4 mounted around the Rubin GPU on a Vera Rubin superchip at the TSMC OIP conference, in a post dated 28 September 2026. Nvidia's supply commitments rose from $119 billion to $279 billion in the quarter to 26 July 2026, "primarily related to the procurement of memory", according to the CFO commentary.

Where the Groq LPU fits

The Groq 3 LPU comes from a non-exclusive inference technology licence that Groq and Nvidia signed on 24 December 2025. Nvidia describes an LPX rack as 256 LPU processors with 128GB of on-chip SRAM and 640 TB/s of scale-up bandwidth, "designed for the low-latency and large-context demands of agentic systems". Deployed alongside Vera Rubin NVL72, Nvidia says the GPUs and LPUs "boost decode", the token-by-token generation phase of inference. On the August call Kress said Groq 3 LPX was showing "nearly 4x the number of tokens per second against the next best alternative", a claim Nvidia has not published benchmark details for in the sources we read.

Our reading: Vera Rubin is no longer one GPU with supporting chips. It is a set of racks for different jobs (GPU compute, CPU work for agents, low-latency decode, storage) sold as one platform. Buyers comparing it with other accelerators should compare at rack and cluster level.

Rubin CPX, reportedly dropped

On 9 September 2025 Nvidia announced Rubin CPX, a GPU for long-context processing with 128GB of GDDR7 memory and up to 30 petaflops of NVFP4 compute, expected at the end of 2026. It does not appear in the March 2026 Vera Rubin release. The Elec reported on 27 May 2026, citing memory and substrate industry sources, that Nvidia had removed Rubin CPX from its roadmap at GTC 2026 and had not placed memory or substrate orders for it. The Elec said Nvidia did not explain the change. We have not seen Nvidia formally cancel the product, so we describe it as reportedly dropped.

Rubin Ultra and Feynman

At GTC in March 2025, Nvidia's keynote blog said: "due for the second half of 2027: systems built on Rubin Ultra." The GTC 2026 pages we opened do not restate a date for Rubin Ultra. The 2025 statement is the most recent dated Nvidia commitment on Rubin Ultra that we could find.

Feynman is the generation after Vera Rubin. Nvidia's GTC 2026 live blog lists its parts as the Rosa CPU, named after Rosalind Franklin; the LP40, a next-generation LPU; BlueField-5; CX10; and Nvidia Kyber for scale-up over both copper and co-packaged optics. It gives no year. Any date for Feynman you read elsewhere is from press coverage or analysts, not from those Nvidia pages.

For scale, Huang said on the August call that Nvidia's revenue opportunity per gigawatt of data centre capacity had grown from about $18 billion with Hopper to $25 billion with Blackwell and $40 billion with Vera Rubin. That is Nvidia's own framing of why each generation matters to its revenue, not a measure of performance.

Dates to watch

DateEventSource
Not announced as of 30 September 2026Results for the quarter ending October 2026, the first with meaningful Vera Rubin revenueNvidia investor relations
1 December 2026, 2pm ETGTC Washington, D.C. keynoteNvidia
15 to 18 March 2027GTC 2027, San Jose, where Nvidia has updated the roadmap in past yearsNvidia
Second half of 2027Rubin Ultra systems, per Nvidia in March 2025Nvidia

Our GTC Berlin preview lists what we were checking for at the 21 October keynote.

Sources

  1. No. 06

    NvidiaAI hardware

    What to watch at Nvidia GTC Berlin 2026

    Nvidia GTC Berlin 2026 runs 20 to 22 October, with Jensen Huang's keynote on 21 October. What Nvidia promised Europe in 2025 and what to look for.

    7 minute read
  2. No. 04

    NvidiaOpen modelsAI industry

    Nvidia's Hugging Face acquisition and open models

    The Nvidia Hugging Face acquisition explained: the terms, what Nvidia has promised open model users, and what to check before the deal closes in 2027.

    7 minute read