NVIDIA Unveils AI Advances at CES 2026: Rubin Platform and Autonomous Driving

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang kicked off CES 2026 with a bold vision for the future of AI, unveiling the Rubin platform, a six-chip AI powerhouse designed to push the boundaries of AI innovation while significantly reducing costs. The announcement, made at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, highlighted NVIDIA’s commitment to integrating AI into every domain, from healthcare and climate science to autonomous driving and robotics.

The Rubin platform, named after pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, is NVIDIA’s first extreme-codesigned AI system, built to eliminate bottlenecks and slash the cost of generating AI tokens to one-tenth of previous platforms. This breakthrough, Huang noted, will make large-scale AI deployment far more economical, enabling developers and enterprises to accelerate AI innovation across industries.

The Rubin Platform: A New Era in AI Computing

At the heart of NVIDIA’s announcements is the Rubin platform, which succeeds the record-breaking Blackwell architecture. The platform’s components, including Rubin GPUs with 50 petaflops of NVFP4 inference, Vera CPUs for data movement, and NVLink 6 networking, are designed to work seamlessly together. This extreme codesign approach is essential for scaling AI to gigascale levels, according to Huang, as it requires tightly integrated innovation across chips, racks, networking, storage, and software.

Huang also introduced AI-native storage with the NVIDIA Inference Context Memory Storage Platform, which boosts long-context inference with 5x higher tokens per second, 5x better performance per dollar, and 5x better power efficiency. This innovation, combined with the Rubin platform’s capabilities, promises to dramatically accelerate AI development and deployment.

Open Models for Global Innovation

NVIDIA’s open models, trained on its supercomputers, are driving breakthroughs across multiple domains. The portfolio includes Clara for healthcare, Earth-2 for climate science, Nemotron for reasoning and multimodal AI, Cosmos for robotics and simulation, GR00T for embodied intelligence, and Alpamayo for autonomous driving. These models are open to the world, allowing companies, industries, and countries to participate in the AI revolution.

Huang emphasized that NVIDIA’s role as a frontier AI builder is to enable global collaboration. ‘You can create the model, evaluate it, guardrail it, and deploy it,’ he said, underscoring the importance of open innovation in driving AI advancements.

The Alpamayo portfolio, which includes reasoning vision language action models and simulation blueprints, is a key component of NVIDIA’s push into autonomous driving. The platform will power the first passenger car featuring Alpamayo built on NVIDIA DRIVE, set to hit the roads in the all-new Mercedes-Benz CLA. This marks a significant step toward NVIDIA’s vision of a future where every vehicle is autonomous.

NVIDIA’s announcements at CES 2026 underscore the company’s leadership in AI and its commitment to driving innovation across industries. With the Rubin platform and open models, NVIDIA is poised to shape the future of AI, making it more accessible, economical, and impactful for developers, enterprises, and society as a whole.