Nvidia's post-Blackwell next generation Vera Rubin GPUs for AI and HPC applications will enter mass production in late 2025, according to renowned analyst Ming-Chi Kuo on Medium.com. Nvidia will focus on the power consumption of its data center GPUs with the R100 processors based on the Rubin architecture, as the extreme amounts of power devoured by Blackwell-based processors present a concern for data centers.
Nvidia's Vera Rubin GPUs will be made on one of TSMC's 3nm-class process technology — most likely using a custom version of the performance-enhanced N3P, though that's merely our speculation. They will reportedly adopt CoWoS-L packaging of about 4x reticle size, though the company has not finalized the interposer design at this point, the analyst says. The package will enable Nvidia to equip its R100 GPU with eight HBM4 stacks.
Although Ming-Chi Kuo has excellent track record with predicting Apple's products and plans, he's still an unofficial source. That means, as usual, you should apply the standard application of salt.
One of the design goals for Nvidia's Rubin GPUs is to keep power consumption in check. Nvidia's B200 GPU can be configured to consume up to 1000W of power, with the GB200 solution that consists of two B200 GPUs and one Grace CPU consuming up to 2700W. Such power consumption makes it challenging for data centers to feed and cool down large clusters of these compute GPUs, so Nvidia will have to do something about it. It remains to be seen whether it will actually manage to lower power consumption while tangibly increasing performance compared to Blackwell-based products, or if it will instead focus on performance efficiency.
Nvidia is projected to start mass production of R100 processors in the fourth quarter of 2025, so actual system and rack solutions based on the company's Rubin GPUs will enter production in the first half of 2026, the analyst believes. As a result, we can expect that R100-based machines will hit actual data centers starting in mid-2026 at earliest. However, given the massive interest in AI and recent history, Nvidia could start talking about Vera Rubin at next year's GTC.
Assuming the information about R100's timing and process technology is correct, it means that Nvidia will stick to its strategy of adopting proven process technologies for its GPUs. By Q4 2025, TSMC will start production of chips on its N2 family of fabrication nodes (2nm-class). These will provide better power, performance, and transistor density characteristics than N3P. By the time N2 is ready, N3P will probably feature lower defect density and reduced pricing (relative to N2), enabling higher yields for Nvidia's near-reticle-size chiplets.
