NVIDIA's Vera Rubin Is a Capex Grenade - and Every Hyperscaler's 2027 Budget Knows It
The Blackwell-to-Rubin transition is a forcing function for the entire data center industry.
When Jensen Huang took the stage at GTC 2026 on March 16, the centerpiece wasn’t a surprise. NVIDIA had already tipped its hand: the Vera Rubin platform, VR200 GPUs in NVL72 rack-scale configurations, is the company’s answer to an inference economy that’s outgrowing Blackwell before Blackwell has even fully saturated the market.
The specs tell one story. The economics tell a more important one.
The hardware: Rubin by the numbers
Let’s start with what NVIDIA is claiming, because the numbers are staggering. Each Rubin GPU delivers roughly 50 petaflops of FP4 inference and 35 petaflops of FP4 training. Per chip. The NVL72 rack — 72 Rubin GPUs paired with 36 Vera CPUs over NVLink 6 — aggregates to 3.6 exaFLOPS of NVFP4 inference and 2.5 exaFLOPS of training in a single rack.