On the opening day of the Consumer Electronics Show, Nvidia announced the Vera Rubin AI superchip platform and the Alpamayo autonomous‑vehicle AI model, marking a significant expansion of the company’s AI infrastructure and physical‑AI portfolio. The Vera Rubin platform is a six‑chip system that combines a Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6 Switch, ConnectX‑9 SuperNIC, BlueField‑4 DPU, and Spectrum‑6 Ethernet Switch, delivering up to five times the training performance of the preceding Blackwell chips while operating in full production. The platform is slated for partner availability in the second half of 2026 and promises a ten‑fold reduction in inference token cost compared with Blackwell, enabling customers to run large‑scale mixture‑of‑experts models with four times fewer GPUs.
The Alpamayo model introduces a vision‑language‑action reasoning engine that enables Level 4 robotaxi capabilities. While the model is a foundational component for autonomous driving, the first production vehicle to ship with Nvidia’s full AV stack will be the Mercedes‑Benz CLA, which will launch with advanced Level 2+ automated driving in the U.S. and is expected to support Level 4 robotaxi deployments in 2027. Nvidia’s open‑source approach to Alpamayo is designed to accelerate adoption across the automotive ecosystem and to compete with proprietary systems such as Tesla’s FSD.
Nvidia’s dual launch underscores a strategic pivot toward “physical AI” and a broader AI‑inference market that analysts project could reach $4–5 trillion over the next five years. By combining extreme code‑design across six chips, the Vera Rubin platform reduces training and inference costs, while the Alpamayo model expands Nvidia’s reach into autonomous mobility and robotics. The company’s partnerships with Microsoft, CoreWeave, Red Hat, Mercedes‑Benz, and Uber validate the technology and signal a growing ecosystem of AI‑powered services.
CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the significance of the launches, stating, “Rubin arrives at exactly the right moment, as AI computing demand for both training and inference is going through the roof. With our annual cadence of delivering a new generation of AI supercomputers, Rubin takes a giant leap toward the next frontier of AI.” He added, “The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here – when machines begin to understand, reason and act in the real world. Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments and explain their driving decisions.”
The announcements position Nvidia as a central player in both high‑performance AI infrastructure and autonomous mobility, reinforcing its competitive edge against rivals such as Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Waymo. The Vera Rubin platform’s cost and performance advantages are expected to accelerate adoption in data‑center and cloud AI workloads, while Alpamayo’s open‑source model is poised to lower barriers for automotive OEMs and fleet operators seeking Level 4 autonomy.
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