Nvidia
CEO Jensen Huang is expected to reveal details about Rubin, the chipmaker’s next AI graphics processor, on Tuesday at the company’s annual GTC conference.
While other tech companies usually name their products using combinations of inscrutable letters and numbers, most of Nvidia’s most recent GPU architectures have been named after famous women scientists.
Nvidia is naming its next critical AI chip platform after Vera Rubin, an American astronomer.
The company has never explained its naming convention, and hasn’t emphasized the diversity aspect of its choices, but Nvidia’s chip names that highlight women and minority scientists are one of the most visible efforts to honor diversity in the tech industry during a period where diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives are being slashed by the Trump administration.
Rubin discovered a lot of what is known about “dark matter,” a form of matter that could make up a quarter of the matter of the universe and which doesn’t emit light or radiation, and she advocated for women in science throughout her career.
Nvidia has been naming its architectures after scientists since 1998, when its first chips were based on the company’s “Fahrenheit” microarchitecture. It’s part of the company’s culture – Nvidia used to sell an employee-only t-shirt with cartoons of several famous scientists on it.
It’s one of Nvidia’s quirks that has received more attention as it’s risen to become one of the three most-valuable tech companies and one of the most important suppliers to Google
, Microsoft
, Amazon
, OpenAI, Tesla
and Meta
.
Investors want to hear on Tuesday how fast the Rubin chips will be, what configurations it will come in and when it might start shipping.
Before revealing a new architecture, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang usually gives a one-sentence biography of the scientist it’s named after.
“I’d like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU named after David Blackwell, mathematician, game theorist, probability,” Huang said at last year’s GTC conference. “We thought it was a perfect name.”
Rubin is a fitting name for Nvidia’s next chip, which comes as the company tries to solidify the gains it has made in recent years as the leader in AI hardware. “Vera” will refer to Nvidia’s next-generation central processor, and “Rubin” will refer to Nvidia’s new GPU.
