Reflections on the next frontier of silicon and the speed of light.

In the mid-70s, Vera Rubin looked at galaxies and realized something massive was missing—something invisible was holding everything together. It’s poetic, then, that NVIDIA’s next titan is named Rubin. In the frantic, gold-rush atmosphere of Silicon Valley, Rubin represents the "invisible" force that will likely hold the next decade of AI together. 

The One-Year Rhythm

We’ve barely had time to wrap our heads around the Blackwell architecture, yet Jensen Huang has already moved the goalposts. The old "two-year cycle" is dead. We are now on a "One-Year Rhythm." It feels like we’re sprinting toward a singularity where the hardware is updated faster than we can write the software to run on it.

The Guts of the R100

The Rubin R100 is a beast of burden designed for the 3nm era. By adopting HBM4, NVIDIA is solving the "memory wall"—the bottleneck where the brain is fast, but the straw it drinks from is too thin. But Rubin isn’t just a chip; it’s an ecosystem. With the Vera CPU, NVIDIA is closing the loop, ensuring that every part of the data center speaks the same language at lightning speed.

"We are building digital gods that require the energy of small cities."

The Cost of Power

Of course, there is the "elephant in the server room": Power. The controversy isn't whether Rubin will be fast—it will be—but whether our power grids and cooling systems can survive its arrival. Liquid cooling is no longer a luxury; it's a requirement for the Rubin era.

Looking Ahead

As we look toward the Rubin Ultra in 2027, one has to wonder: are we just building better tools, or are we constructing the infrastructure for a new type of ghost in the machine? Like the dark matter Vera Rubin discovered, we can’t see the final form of AI yet, but we can certainly feel its gravity.