Nvidia Rubin Platform Fully Operational: Chipmaker Significantly Raises Revenue Targets After CES Announcement

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced a major milestone: the new Vera Rubin AI platform is now fully in production. This announcement fuels the already optimistic mood within the company and leads to a reassessment of previous revenue forecasts for the data center business.

Finance Chief Colette Kress expressed a clearly bullish outlook on Tuesday at a conference hosted by JP Morgan: The forecast of $500 billion in revenue from data center computers by October 2025 will definitely be exceeded. “This number will certainly be even higher,” Kress emphasized, pointing to the continuously rising demand from Nvidia customers since Huang presented the original forecast at the GTC conference.

Massive Performance Increase of the Rubin Architecture

The new Rubin system offers a significant technological leap over the current Blackwell generation. Inference performance reaches 50 PFLOPS at NVFP4 precision – five times that of Blackwell. During training, the Rubin GPU achieves 35 PFLOPS, a 3.5-fold increase over the previous generation. Notably, the cost per generated token during inference drops to as little as one-tenth of the Blackwell platform.

Huang described the Rubin GPU as “an enormous monster” and emphasized that this performance jump was achieved through an “extremely synergistic design” – a complete reengineering of CPU, GPU, network interfaces, and cooling systems. The first customer deliveries are planned for the second half of 2026.

Memory Capacity as a Competitive Advantage

A core issue of AI systems – the memory bottleneck – is addressed by an innovative memory platform. Based on the BlueField-4 DPU, Nvidia provides an additional 16 TB of fast shared memory alongside 1 TB of local storage, connected via 200 Gb/s bandwidth. This solution aims to significantly alleviate the “memory problem” when processing long texts.

Huang’s statement on the critical importance of memory for AI systems – “This is a market that has never existed in this form before; it could become the largest memory market in the world” – triggered immediate market reactions. SanDisk recorded its strongest daily sales in the S&P 500 on Tuesday, with an increase of nearly 27.6%, while Western Digital and Seagate Technology also posted double-digit gains.

Energy Efficiency Revolutionizes Data Center Infrastructure

Another breakthrough lies in energy efficiency. The Rubin NVL72 rack uses 100% liquid cooling and supports inlet air temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius. This means that energy-intensive chilled water systems are no longer required – Huang stated that data centers worldwide could save about 6% of their electricity consumption with this technology.

However, this innovation also led to losses among cooling system manufacturers. Johnson Controls fell by over 6.2%, and Modine Manufacturing by nearly 7.5%. Analysts attribute the price declines to concerns about medium- to long-term demand for chilled water systems, after Huang explained that Rubin systems can be cooled with the same airflow as Blackwell systems.

Employment Forecasts and Market Expectations

Goldman Sachs had already pointed out at the end of October that Nvidia’s original $500 billion forecast was about 12% above the market consensus of $447 billion and 10% above Goldman Sachs’ own expectation of $453 billion. Kress now indicated that the order volume could significantly surpass these expectations.

Particularly noteworthy: The $500 billion volume does not even include work resulting from the new OpenAI agreement with Nvidia. The announced $100 billion investment deal with OpenAI has not yet been finalized but could generate additional significant orders.

Chinese Market Remains a Wildcard

Regarding Chinese demand, Kress explained that the US government is currently reviewing license applications. Nvidia has already received orders from Chinese customers, but the specific outcome remains unclear. Huang also emphasized that demand from Chinese customers for the new chips is “strong” – a signal that, despite regulatory uncertainties, there is robust market interest.

Market Performance Remains Cautious

Despite the consistently positive signals from Kress and Huang, Nvidia’s stock could not sustain the upward momentum. After gaining over 2% in early trading hours, the stock fell during the day and closed nearly 0.5% lower. This is already the second consecutive trading day with a decline. Nevertheless, Nvidia has already gained about 39% in 2025 and remains a major driver of US stock market gains – though far from the over 170% increase in 2024, as concerns about an AI bubble and increasing competition from Google’s TPU continue to weigh on sentiment.