GTC buzz: inference bonanza
Jensen Huang’s GTC message was clear — 'inference inflection' and massive enterprise demand, with social posts claiming $1T+ Blackwell/Rubin orders and a new Vera CPU/Vera Rubin 7‑chip platform on stage ( ). Cisco also demoed RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell servers aimed at enterprise inference in a 'Secure AI Factory' setup, underscoring a push to industrialize model serving (x.com).
Nvidia told investors it now expects “at least $1 trillion” of orders for its Blackwell and Rubin families through 2027, a figure CEO Jensen Huang gave during the GTC keynote that updated last year’s ~$500 billion view. (cnbc.com) The Vera Rubin platform was presented as a seven‑chip, rack‑scale system now in full production and Nvidia named early customers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Mistral AI alongside every major cloud provider. (nvidianews.nvidia.com) Nvidia’s NVL72 rack specification lists 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs per rack, with vendor specs citing about 3.6 exaFLOPS of NVFP4 inference and design targets of up to 10x throughput per watt versus Blackwell. (nvidia.com) The Vera CPU is an 88‑core Arm design (marketed as 88 Olympus cores) and Nvidia says the platform supports up to 2 TB of SOCAMM memory per superchip and expanded HBM4 capacity at rack scale. (nvidia.com) Nvidia integrated Groq’s LPU architecture into a new Groq 3 LPX inference rack as part of the Rubin stack, with Nvidia’s developer blog touting up to ~35x higher inference throughput per megawatt for certain agentic workloads. (developer.nvidia.com) Cisco announced RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition support across Cisco UCS and the Cisco Unified Edge as part of its Secure AI Factory offering, with orderability and Cisco Validated Designs and Intersight management rolling out starting in March 2026. (blogs.cisco.com) Hardware partners named for Vera Rubin systems include Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro and Foxconn, while Nvidia and partners said customer availability for partner systems will begin in the second half of 2026. (videocardz.com)
