--- title: "Vera Rubin: what it means · The AI Compute Race · DRYBURGH" source: https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/vera-rubin description: "Vera Rubin: The NVIDIA accelerator generation after Blackwell. Its NVL72 rack is the design SpaceX's first satellites are to carry. Chapters 5, 13." --- # Vera Rubin What does “Vera Rubin” mean? Vera RubinThe NVIDIA accelerator generation after Blackwell. Its NVL72 rack is the design SpaceX’s first satellites are to carry. *Chapters 5, 13.* From *The AI Compute Race*. [Read the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#buy) ## Where the book uses it - [Chapter 5 — The Island in Every Machine](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes/chapter-5)Why every accelerator runs through Taiwan: the foundry, the packaging and the memory that are booked years ahead, and what that does to anyone arriving late with cash. - [Chapter 13 — A Change of Landlord](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes/chapter-13)The two proposed escapes from the constraints, the Gulf and orbit, and which constraints each actually removes. ## Sources that use it - Harsh Singh Banwait, “NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave: 10x More Tokens Per Megawatt Than Blackwell,” CoreWeave blog, 21 July 2026 (CoreWeave’s own measurement, on DeepSeek R1: “At a matched interactivity target, Vera Rubin NVL72 generated 10x tokens-per-second per megawatt compared to NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 on the same DeepSeek R1 workload”; the conditions, “with all major, state-of-the-art inference optimizations turned on,” among them “large-scale expert parallelism, NVFP4 precision, multi-token prediction, and disaggregated prefill and decode”; the page’s other wording of the result, “up to 10x higher tokens per megawatt”; what it means for customers, in the company’s words: “run far more reasoning-model traffic within the same power budget or run the same traffic on far less power”; CoreWeave sells the capacity it measured, and NVIDIA’s blog of the same day relays the figure as its own platform’s; the comparison on both systems, “This evaluation compares the performance on each platform with all major, state-of-the-art inference optimizations turned on”; read in the page as served in October 2026, which carries its publication date). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#coreweave-vera-rubin-jul26) - Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic, “Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announce strategic partnerships,” joint announcement published simultaneously on all three newsrooms, 18 November 2025 (Anthropic “has committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and to contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt”; “Anthropic’s compute commitment will initially be up to one gigawatt of compute capacity with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems”; “NVIDIA and Microsoft are committing to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion respectively in Anthropic”; no term is stated for the $30 billion; Anthropic’s copy alone closes “Amazon remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner”, and NVIDIA’s alone writes “Microsoft Azure AI Foundry” where the other two write “Microsoft Foundry”). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#anthropic-msft-nvidia-nov25) - NVIDIA Newsroom, “SpaceXAI Adopts NVIDIA Vera CPU to Accelerate Agentic AI at Massive Scale,” 24 August 2026 (the first-generation Starmind AI satellite “based on an optimized NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 system”; the Vera CPUs are for SpaceXAI’s terrestrial agentic workloads — the register said until 11 September 2026 that the orbital design ran on the Vera CPU, which the release does not say). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#nvidia-starmind) - NVIDIA, “NVIDIA Vera Rubin Opens Agentic AI Frontier,” keynote press release, 16 March 2026 (it does not carry the live blog’s figure — its three uses of “trillion” are all “trillion-parameter”). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#nvidia-vera-rubin-pr-mar26) - Starcloud, “Starcloud Raises $250 Million at $2.3 Billion Valuation to Scale AI with Orbital Data Centers,” Business Wire, 21 August 2026 (total raised $450 million; 88,000-satellite / 20 GW vision; NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Module collaboration; “The funding brings Starcloud’s total capital raised to $450 million since its founding in 2024.”). [In the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources/company#starcloud-bw) And 4 more: [search the Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources). ## Related terms - [Accelerator](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/accelerator) - [Blackwell](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/blackwell) - [Rack](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/rack) - [Advanced packaging](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/advanced-packaging) - [AI factory](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/ai-factory) - [Booked, allocated, rationed](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/booked-allocated-rationed) - [Change of landlord](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/change-of-landlord) - [CHIPS Act](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/chips-act) - [Convertible](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/convertible) - [CoWoS](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/cowos) - [Custom silicon](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/custom-silicon) - [Cut-out](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/cut-out) From the glossary of The AI Compute Race. - [Campuses](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/ledger) - [Tests](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests) - [Scorecard](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/scorecard) - [Data](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/data/releases) - [Chapter by chapter](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/companion) - [The record at a glance](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/observatory) - [The machine](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/machine) - [One campus, four futures](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/hyperion) - [Glossary](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary) - [People](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/people) - [Sources](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/sources) - [Notes](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/notes) - [Where the book was wrong](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/corrections) - [Where its sources were wrong](https://dryburgh.com/corrections?book=vol1) - [The Paper](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/paper) - [Consent](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/consent) - [Who builds and pays](https://dryburgh.com/vol1/parties) *The AI Compute Race: Five Races, One Machine* is a book by Lee S. Dryburgh, the first volume of THE COMPUTE ECONOMY, published by Dryburgh, an imprint of Contestra OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia; its record closes on 8 November 2026. [About the book](https://dryburgh.com/vol1)[Tell me when it is out](https://dryburgh.com/vol1#notify)