By Timothy Green, The Motley Fool
Publication Date: 2026-01-14 15:40:00
The Rubin platform can significantly reduce token costs, opening up new use cases for AI.
While Nvidia (NVDA 2.34%) had very little to offer consumers at CES 2026, the GPU giant officially took the wraps off its new Rubin platform for AI data centers. The new platform features the company’s Vera CPUs, Rubin GPUs, and a variety of home-grown networking technology. A rack-scale solution with 72 GPUs and a small-scale system with 8 GPUs will be available in the second half of 2026.
Image source: Nvidia.
One big selling point of Rubin is dramatically lower AI inference costs. Compared to Nvidia’s last-gen Blackwell platform, inference workloads on Rubin can be run at a 90% lower cost per token. Tokens are units of data processed by AI models, and it’s how customers of those models are generally charged for use.
Speaking to Axios, multiple industry experts pointed to 2026 as the year when AI must prove itself. “Enterprises will need to see real ROI in their spend, and countries need to see meaningful increases in productivity growth to keep the AI spend and infrastructure going,” said Menlo Ventures partner Venky Ganesan. “Boards will stop counting tokens and pilots and start counting dollars,” said EY global tech leader James Brundage.
Nvidia’s Rubin platform and its drastically lower token costs are arriving at the perfect time to make AI work for enterprises.
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