Nvidia Corp’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) Rubin CPX appeared to have disappeared from the company’s AI roadmap earlier this year. Now, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the chip giant has revived the accelerator with a substantially redesigned architecture and plans to begin production in the first quarter of 2027.
Ming-Chi Kuo Says Nvidia Has Revived Rubin CPX
"Just as the market had come to believe that Rubin CPX had been dropped from Nvidia’s product roadmap," Kuo said Monday in a post on X, adding that his latest industry checks indicate that Nvidia has "revived the program."
Kuo said the new version is designed to deliver stronger prefill performance, with major changes to both its GPU specifications and rack architecture.
Rubin CPX is designed to accelerate the prefill stage of AI inference — the process of reading and processing a model’s input before it generates a response.
Kuo said the accelerator will feature 168GB of HBM4 high-bandwidth memory per GPU, compared with 288GB of HBM4 memory in Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and 128GB of GDDR7 memory in the earlier CPX design.
Nvidia Rubin CPX Gets a Major Rack Redesign
The revived CPX will move into a standalone MGX ETL rack instead of sharing a rack with Rubin GPUs, according to Kuo.
Customers could configure systems with 64, 128, 192 or 256 CPX GPUs. Within each 64-GPU module, eight compute trays would each house eight CPX GPUs, alongside a switch tray.
Kuo also said Nvidia will use NVLink to connect the eight GPUs within each tray, while Ethernet will handle communication between trays and rack modules.
Rubin CPX Will Work Alongside Vera Rubin
Rather than replacing Rubin, CPX is expected to work alongside Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.
Kuo said Nvidia recommends a 1:1 ratio of CPX to Rubin GPUs, with CPX handling prefill and generating the KV cache before transferring that information to Rubin over Ethernet RDMA for the decode stage.
Kuo’s statement came after Nvidia appeared to remove CPX from its roadmap at GTC 2026, where the company instead highlighted Groq 3 LPUs and LPX racks.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to Benzinga’s request for comment.
Nvidia’s Revenue Surges as Vera Rubin Ramps Up
In August, Nvidia reported $96.22 billion in second-quarter revenue, marking a 106% increase from a year earlier and surpassing the Street consensus estimate of $92.18 billion.
The company also said Vera Rubin was ramping into full production, with CoreWeave, Nebius, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud among its partners.
Price Action: Nvidia shares closed at $220.50 on Monday, up 1.36%. In after-hours trading, the shares are down 0.10%, according to Benzinga Pro.
According to Benzinga Edge Rankings, Nvidia ranks in the 98th percentile for growth and maintains positive price-trend ratings across the short-, medium- and long-term time frames.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Photo: Robert Way from Shutterstock
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