Nvidia has started delivering samples of its Vera Rubin platform for next-generation AI data centers to select customers, the company announced at its earnings call on Wednesday. As soon as the company's partners qualify and validate the new platform, they may start preparations for its deployment, which is expected in the second half of 2026 or in early 2027.
" We shipped our first Vera Rubin samples to customers earlier this week, and we remain on track to commence production shipments in the second half of the year," said Colette Kress, chief financial officer of Nvidia, during the company's earnings call with analysts and investors.
The fact that Nvidia began sampling of Vera Rubin with customers almost certainly means that it has frozen performance and power specifications of the parts by now, though it remains to be seen whether the company ended up upgrading performance of its GPUs to strengthen its leadership.
Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform is the company's next-generation architecture for AI data centers that includes an 88-core Vera CPU, Rubin GPU with 288 GB HBM4 memory, Rubin CPX GPU with 128 GB of GDDR7, NVLink 6.0 switch ASIC for scale-up rack-scale connectivity, BlueField-4 DPU with integrated SSD to store key-value cache, Spectrum-6 Photonics Ethernet, and Quantum-CX9 1.6 Tb/s Photonics InfiniBand NICs, as well as Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet and Quantum-CX9 Photonics InfiniBand switching silicon for scale-out connectivity.
In a bid to get ready for the arrival of the Vera Rubin platform, the company's partners have to prepare their software and hardware stacks for it, so different partners will get different parts of the platform, whereas some will get actual NVL72 VR200 racks packing all of the aforementioned components. Also, samples of actual silicon will also go to hardware partners, such as Foxconn, Quanta, Supermicro, Wistron, and other well-known makers of AI servers.
According to market rumors, Nvidia intends to ship its partners fully assembled Level-10 (L10) VR200 compute trays with Vera CPU and Rubin GPUs, cooling systems, and interfaces pre-installed, leaving very little design and integration work freedom to its ODMs.
"Based on its modular cable-free tray design, Rubin will deliver improved resiliency and serviceability relative to Blackwell," Kress added. "We expect every cloud model builder to deploy Vera Rubin."
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