At CES 2026, Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang outlined a sweeping vision for AI's next computing cycle, confirming that the company's next-generation Vera Rubin platform is already in full production.
AI Enters A New Computing Cycle, Huang Says
Taking the stage at a packed Fontainebleau Las Vegas venue, Huang said the computing industry is undergoing a once-in-a-decade transition — and this time, two shifts are happening simultaneously. Applications are now being built directly on AI, and the process of building software itself has fundamentally changed.
He made a fashionably late appearance in his signature leather jacket — shinier than usual — greeted the crowd with a New Year's wish and immediately launched into Nvidia's success in scaling AI, pushing it toward agentic systems, teaching it the laws of nature and beyond.
Huang said the computing industry undergoes a major transformation roughly every 10 to 15 years, with each shift ushering in a new platform. This time, two transitions are happening at once: applications are increasingly built around AI and the process of developing software itself is being fundamentally redefined.
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AI Is Moving Beyond Chatbots
Huang traced AI's evolution from early neural networks to transformers and today's large language models, arguing that the next phase extends well beyond text-based systems. He emphasized the rise of agentic AI, models capable of planning, reasoning and acting autonomously over time.
"Large language models isn’t the only form of information," Huang said. "Wherever the universe has information, wherever the universe has structure, we could teach a large language model."
That includes what Nvidia calls physical AI — systems trained to understand and interact with the real world using the laws of physics.
Open Models Are Catching Up Fast
A major theme of the keynote was Nvidia's bet on open AI ecosystems. Huang said open models are now roughly six months behind proprietary frontier models and continue to close the gap.
According to Huang, about 80% of startups are building on open models and a significant share of AI usage across developer platforms now relies on open-source systems. Nvidia is releasing not only its models, but also the data and lifecycle tools used to train, evaluate and deploy them.
Physical AI Powers Robots And Autonomous Vehicles
Nvidia highlighted its Cosmos world foundation model, which generates realistic simulations and synthetic data to train robots and autonomous systems. Huang said Nvidia uses Cosmos internally for self-driving development.
The company also unveiled Alpamayo, an open-source reasoning and decision-making AI for autonomous driving. Huang said it allows vehicles to learn from limited real-world data and handle unfamiliar scenarios.
Nvidia's open models are also rapidly closing the gap with frontier systems, topping leaderboards in areas like OCR, PDF comprehension, natural language search and more.
Next Era Of Robotics Systems Is Going To Be… Robots
At one point, during the keynote, Star Wars' BDX droids entered the stage — fully autonomous, powered by Nvidia Cosmos. Huang was clearly enjoying a lively back-and-forth with the droids.
Nvidia is also teaming up with Siemens, signaling a major leap for manufacturing as Nvidia's physical AI uses synthetic data from digital factory twins to train next-generation robotics.
Vera Rubin Enters Full Production
Huang confirmed that Vera Rubin, Nvidia's next-generation AI supercomputing platform and successor to Blackwell, is now in full production. The system delivers up to five times the performance of Blackwell while improving efficiency, memory bandwidth and interconnect speeds.
Vera Rubin integrates advanced GPUs, custom CPUs, high-speed networking and full-stack encryption and is designed to address what Huang called AI's next major constraint: context and data movement.
“NVIDIA Rubin platform, the successor to the record‑breaking NVIDIA Blackwell architecture and the company's first extreme-codesigned, six‑chip AI platform, is now in full production,” the company also later said in a blog post.
Vera Rubin also integrates NVIDIA's ConnectX-9 Spectrum-X SuperNIC and can be assembled in just five minutes, compared with roughly two hours for previous systems. The entire platform is water-cooled.
An NVLink 6 Switch enables all GPUs within Vera Rubin to communicate simultaneously.
Huang said the system is fully encrypted for enhanced security and uses hot-water cooling at around 45°C — a counterintuitive approach that, he noted, significantly reduces energy costs.
At the beginning of Vera Rubin’s presentation, Huang also referenced astronomer Vera Rubin, who observed that the outer edges of galaxies were rotating nearly as fast as their centers — a breakthrough that led to the discovery of dark matter. Huang said Nvidia will name its next computer in her honor.
Price Action: Nvidia shares were down 0.39% during Monday’s regular session and slipped another 0.069% in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro.
According to Benzinga's Edge Stock Rankings, Nvidia ranks in the 94th percentile for Growth and the 97th percentile for Quality. Click here to see how it compares with its peers.
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