This year’s Blackwell Ultra isn’t what we originally expected when Nvidia said last year that it would begin producing new AI chips on a yearly cadence, faster than ever before, as Blackwell Ultra is not on a new architecture.

GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, starts this week in San Jose. We're on the ground covering all the major developments. CEO Jensen Huang will give a keynote address focusing on — what else?

The centerpiece announcement was Vera Rubin, first teased at Computex 2024 and now scheduled for release in the second half of 2026. This GPU, named after a famous astronomer, will feature tens of terabytes of memory and comes with a custom Nvidia-designed CPU called Vera.