Nvidia’s Vera Rubin is months away — Blackwell is getting faster right now

The big news this week from Nvidia, splashed in headlines across all forms of media, was the company's announcement about its Vera Rubin GPU.

This week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used his CES keynote to highlight performance metrics for the new chip. According to Huang, the Rubin GPU is capable of 50 PFLOPs of NVFP4 inference and 35 PFLOPs of NVFP4 training performance, representing 5x and 3.5x the performance of Blackwell.

But it won't be available until the second half of 2026. So what should enterprises be doing now?

Blackwell keeps on getting better

The current, shipping Nvidia GPU architecture is Blackwell, which was announced in 2024 as the successor to Hopper.  Alongside that release, Nvidia emphasized that that its product engineering path also included squeezing as much performance as possible out of the prior Grace Hopper architecture.

It's a direction that will hold true for ...