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It's hardly surprising that there was almost no mention of the gaming side of the business in Nvidia's latest quarterly earnings call. The company has been riding high on all things AI for several years now, to the tune of a $5.41 trillion market capitalisation as I write this. Unsurprisingly, CEO Jensen Huang is excited about what role the company's hardware will play in the industry's future.
"Vera Rubin is going to be even more successful than Grace Blackwell at this point," Huang said in response to an investor question. "Every single frontier model company will jump on Vera Rubin from the get go—and that was not true before on Blackwell. Vera Rubin is off to a tremendous start, and it will surely be more successful than even Grace Blackwell."
For those who need the refresher, Vera Rubin is Nvidia's six-trillion transistor AI 'superchip'.
It enjoys 100 times as much compute as the Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip that powers the Nvidia DGX Spark AI box. To be clear, though, 'Blackwell' also refers to the microarchitecture on which the RTX 50 series of GPUs are built. Vera Rubin will obviously be a far more specialised bit of kit, capable of rustling up 100 petaflops of raw compute and enjoying 60 times as many transistors as an RTX 5090 graphics card.
Anyway, long story short, rapidly expanding AI partners mean that Nvidia, too, is on a roll. Huang said on the same call, "Demand for AI infrastructure continues to expand at an unprecedented pace. The build out of AI factories is accelerating. The value of NVIDIA AI infrastructure is rising."
Such enthusiasm is within the company's own interest, though. For one thing, the first hint that the company's continued growth is about to flatten could result in the share price dipping.
If you're looking for a more nuanced view from someone outside of Nvidia, our Jacob casts doubt on the company line and chats to a number of experts about the future of the AI industry. The mere fact that even the experts offer diverging visions suggests that AI's future is far from certain.
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Nvidia RTX 5050
4. Best mid-range: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
