Nathaniel Whittemore

Agents are the new workload.

They will run everywhere from the data center to the edge.

Now, in addition to those new machines, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang also announced that Vera Rubin had entered full production.

OpenAI and Anthropic have already taken delivery of their first units, with plans to scale up into full data center buildouts this year.

The Vera Rubin nomenclature refers to the CPU-GPU pairing in the chip.

Vera is the CPU, while Rubin is the GPU architecture.

For the first time for an NVIDIA data center chip, the focus is on the CPU and its ability to supercharge agentic AI.

Said Huang, AI agents will be the largest users of computing.

Vera is the first CPU designed for that future, built to run agentic AI at hyperscale with extraordinary performance, efficiency, and programmability.

Making that comparison that I just mentioned, The Verge argued that the RTX Spark could be the M1 moment for Windows.

i.e., until now, Apple's M-series chips have been the go-to for running AI models locally, and now in its fifth generation, the M-series architecture has been utterly dominant.

Apple has been the only choice for local inference, and many of us have the Mac minis to prove it.

NVIDIA is looking to replicate that breakout moment and capture a new slice of the market, going head-to-head with Apple for what Huang is calling the personal AI computer.

Now, this idea of personal AI computing feels to me like it's very likely to be on display throughout the week as Microsoft Build kicks off.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the RTX Spark announcement as a kickoff, tweeting that their goal at Microsoft was to deliver, quote, unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows.

Now, staying on hardware for a minute, Meta is apparently joining the AI hardware competition with a new pendant.

The information reports that Meta plans to begin testing the pendant over the next year as part of a broader AI hardware strategy, a leaked memo described a push into business-focused devices, which they are calling wearables for work.

The core strategy, however, is to use wearables as the hook to increase use of Meta's AI models and drive consumer agent subscriptions.

Now, it is worth noting that Meta is coming at this competition from a slightly different place, considering that the Meta Ray-Bans are the most popular AI device on the market.

At this point, obviously, AI pendants are not a going concern for most people, but it appears that Meta wants to ensure that they have a product available just in case, preempting new devices from Google and OpenAI, and forming something of a natural conclusion of Meta acquiring AI pendant startup Limitless at the end of last year.