Episode Summary

Austin and Vik break down NVIDIA’s CES 2026 keynote, focusing on Vera Rubin, DGX Spark and DGX Station, uneducated investor panic, and physical AI.

Key Takeaways

• DGX Spark brings server-class NVIDIA architecture to the desktop at low power, aimed at developers, enthusiasts, and enterprises experimenting locally.
• DGX Station functions more like a mini-AI rack on-prem: Grace Blackwell for inference and development without full racks
• The historical parallel is mainframes to minicomputers, expanding compute TAM rather than displacing cloud usage.
• On-prem AI converts some GPU rental OpEx into CapEx, appealing to CFOs
• NVIDIA positioned autonomy as physical AI with vision-language-action models and early Mercedes-Benz deployments in 2026.
• Vera Rubin integrates CPU, GPU, DPU, networking, and photonics into a single platform, emphasizing Ethernet for scale-out. (Where was the Infiniband switch?)
• The new Vera CPU highlights rising CPU importance for agentic workloads through higher core counts, SMT, and large LPDDR capacity.
• Rubin GPU’s move to HBM4 and adaptive precision targets inference efficiency gains and lower cost per token.
• Context memory storage elevates SSDs and DPUs, enabling massive KV cache offload beyond HBM and DRAM.
• Cable-less rack design and warm-water cooling show NVIDIA’s shift from raw performance toward manufacturability and enterprise polish.