By TIME
Publication Date: 2026-04-30 13:25:00
The world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, designs the chips at the heart of the AI boom. The behemoth is preparing its next-generation AI computing platform for release later this year: the Vera Rubin, named after the astronomer whose observations confirmed the existence of dark matter, the invisible mass whose gravity holds galaxies together. Nvidia claims the new supercomputer will deliver five times the inference performance of its predecessor and reduce the cost per token by a factor of ten. Ahead of the Vera Rubin’s release, the biggest tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, are funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into the data centers that will house them; upon delivery, they will set the supercomputers to work training vast new AI models at a scale the world has never seen. Nobody knows what that effort will yield—for the economy, for workers, or for an increasingly fragile global order. In its February earnings report, Nvidia posted quarterly net income of $43 billion, up 94% from a year earlier—an astounding rate of growth for a company already worth more than $4.8 trillion. Just like Rubin’s dark matter, Nvidia is now the invisible glue holding the tech economy together
