Elon Musk makes a 'prediction' on Nvidia's Rubin chips; says: Won't be operational before ...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has now shared his opinion on Nvidia’s newly unveiled Vera Rubin chips the company showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026. Musk acknowledged the impressive design and performance of the chips, but predicted that the technology would take ‘another nine months’ before becoming operational at scale.

The comments made by Musk came in response to a video shared by influencer Sawyer Merritt. The video shared highlighted the architecture and capabilities of the new Nvidia chip.

Nvidia’s Rubin chip explained

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Rubin chips as the successor to the Blackwell architecture. Huang claimed that the Rubin chips will offer five times more performance. Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s first six-chip AI platform developed using an “extreme codesign” approach, where multiple components are designed together.

The platform includes Rubin GPUs, Vera CPUs, NVLink 6 networking, Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics, ConnectX-9 networking cards and BlueField-4 data processing units.

Nvidia said this design helps reduce bottlenecks and improve performance for large AI workloads.The Rubin GPU delivers up to 50 petaflops of inference performance using NVFP4 precision. The Vera CPU is designed to handle data movement and AI agent processing tasks.

Nvidia said the platform is built to support large-scale AI training and inference more efficiently.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s prediction

Despite all the hype around the latest Nvidia chipset, Musk has raised caution that scaling Rubin chips would take time. “It will take another nine months before the technology becomes operational at scale and the software can function smoothly,” he wrote on X.The remarks made by Musk suggest that while Nvidia’s hardware leap is significant, the ecosystem around it — including software optimization and deployment — will require months of refinement before widespread adoption.

Elon Musk on Nvidia’s self‑driving push

Nvidia also unveiled Alpamayo, its new self‑driving technology built on a vision‑language‑action model, which Huang described as the “ChatGPT moment” for autonomous driving. Musk, however, expressed skepticism, noting that distribution of such technology would be “super hard” to solve. Tesla’s AI chief Ashok Elluswamy echoed Musk’s concerns, though Musk ultimately wished Nvidia success in advancing self‑driving systems.