Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has now confirmed that the company’s $500 billion AI demand outlook will not get revised quarter by quarter, even as new developments continue to push expectations higher. Speaking in an interview with CNBC’s Kim Leswing at the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 in Las Vegas, US Huang said that the figure reflects that Nvidia already sees on its books across 2025 and 2026, but added that “many new developments should increase our expectation,” signaling upside beyond the headline number.The visibility incorporates demand for Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs, next-generation Vera Rubin chips, and related systems and networking hardware. Huang also stressed on the fact that the figure represents locked-in business and not speculative projections, underscoring Nvidia’s confidence in its pipeline.
Nvidia CFO: The Figure Has Already Grown
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress reinforced Huang’s comments, noting that the $500 billion visibility has already increased since the company’s GTC conference in October. “So yes, that $500 billion has definitely gotten larger,” Kress said, adding that Nvidia is already seeing orders for Rubin chips as customers plan full‑year volumes.Those customers include major cloud service providers, AI model developers, and neoclouds, signaling that demand for Nvidia’s next‑generation platforms is being locked in well ahead of launch.Along with this, Huang also pointed to the rapid increase of open-source AI models as a surprise driver of demand. Models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, and Meta’s Llama are now generating roughly one in four tokens, he said. Rather than reducing compute needs, the spread of open models has expanded overall usage, fueling more demand for Nvidia’s chips.This trend is reinforced by major partnerships. In November 2025, Microsoft and Nvidia announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic, including a combined $15 billion investment in the AI startup.
Nvidia’s Rubin chip explained
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Rubin chips as the successor to the Blackwell architecture. Huang claimed that the Rubin chips will offer five times more performance. Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s first six-chip AI platform developed using an “extreme codesign” approach, where multiple components are designed together. The platform includes Rubin GPUs, Vera CPUs, NVLink 6 networking, Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics, ConnectX-9 networking cards and BlueField-4 data processing units. Nvidia said this design helps reduce bottlenecks and improve performance for large AI workloads.The Rubin GPU delivers up to 50 petaflops of inference performance using NVFP4 precision. The Vera CPU is designed to handle data movement and AI agent processing tasks. Nvidia said the platform is built to support large-scale AI training and inference more efficiently.
Elon Musk makes a ‘prediction’ on Nvidia’s Rubin chips
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has now shared his opinion on Nvidia’s newly unveiled Vera Rubin chips the company showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026. Musk acknowledged the impressive design and performance of the chips, but predicted that the technology would take ‘another nine months’ before becoming operational at scale. The comments made by Musk came in response to a video shared by influencer Sawyer Merritt. The video shared highlighted the architecture and capabilities of the new Nvidia chip.