Club holding Nvidia isn’t taking its foot off the gas in the fast-moving artificial intelligence race. Nvidia announced Sunday that its next-generation AI chip platform, dubbed Rubin, is due in 2026, with plans to release an upgraded version of its forthcoming Blackwell architecture in 2025. The initial iteration of Blackwell products was unveiled less than three months ago and is set to ship to customers later this year. Nvidia expects to see meaningful revenue from Blackwell this year. The updated look at Nvidia’s roadmap — delivered by CEO Jensen Huang at the Computex conference in Taiwan — made it clear the company knows it must keep innovating to maintain its leadership position in the increasingly crowded AI chip market. Shares of Nvidia rose more than 2% Monday, extending its year-to-date gains to roughly 129%. Nvidia is believed to command at least 80% of the market for AI training , a computationally intensive process in which AI models are fed vast quantities of data before being deployed for everyday use. Nvidia’s sales, profit, and stock price have soared after the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT , which was trained on Nvidia chips, sparked a massive wave of investment into AI technology. NVDA .SPX 1Y mountain Nvidia’s stock performance over the past 12 months compared with the S & P 500. The fresh details Sunday underscore Nvidia’s commitment to roll out a new version of its AI chip platform roughly every year, instead of the two-year cadence it used to follow. The company first teased the change in an October investor presentation. In a sign of the competition, Advanced Micro Devices , Nvidia’s main rival in the booming AI chip market, also highlighted plans at Computex to release updated processors each year. AMD launched its most formidable chip to rival Nvidia in late 2023 called the MI300X. AMD said it plans to release the MI325X in the fourth quarter of this year, with the MI350 and MI400 set to follow in 2025 and 2026, respectively. Nvidia and AMD alike face competition in the AI chip market from influential tech companies like Google parent Alphabet , Microsoft and Amazon that are making more of their own processors. These companies also represent key buyers of products from Nvidia and AMD. For its part, Nvidia plans to introduce Blackwell Ultra in 2025, which will have enhanced memory and networking features compared with the initial lineup of products being shipped this year. Among the details Nvidia shared about the Rubin architecture set for release in 2026: It will have the yet-to-be-released, next-generation version of high-bandwidth memory called HBM4. Nvidia plans to release the Rubin Ultra in 2027. Like its predecessors, the Rubin platform also will include both graphics processing units (GPUs), a kind of chip especially well-suited for AI tasks, and traditional processors known as central processing units (CPUs). The difference is Rubin will boast Nvidia’s second-generation CPU called Vera. Blackwell and its predecessor architecture, Hopper, both feature Grace CPUs, which were first announced in 2021 and launched last year. Vera Rubin — the inspiration for Nvidia’s forthcoming product family — was an astronomer who in the 1970s found evidence for what’s now called dark matter, according to the Smithsonian . Wall Street analysts were upbeat on Nvidia’s update on Blackwell and disclosure of the Rubin platform. The product announcements “continue to bolster” Nvidia’s AI leadership position, Bank of America analysts wrote to clients Monday. The firm reiterated its price target of $1,500 per share and top-pick designation on Nvidia’s stock. Huang’s presentation at Computex reinforced Goldman Sach’s view that “Nvidia will remain the accelerated computing industry standard for the foreseeable future, as it extends its competitive advantage through its R & D scale … and inherent virtuous cycle rooted in the large GPU installed base Nvidia has built over the past few decades,” analysts at the firm told clients Monday. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang delivers his keystone speech ahead of Computex 2024 in Taipei on June 2, 2024.
Sam Yeh | AFP | Getty Images
Club holding Nvidia isn’t taking its foot off the gas in the fast-moving artificial intelligence race.