Nvidia expects to sell $20 billion of Vera Rubin systems in Q3 as shipments begin — figure would account for 20% of its data center revenue mix, marks fastest ramp in company history

Nvidia expects sales of the Vera Rubin platform to account for around 20% of its data center revenue in the third quarter of its fiscal year 2027, which will make it the company's fastest-ramping data center product in history. As Nvidia projects its revenue to be around $108 billion in Q3 FY2027, sales of Vera Rubin hardware alone will total around $20 billion in just one quarter.

"We see Vera Rubin accounting for about 20% of data center revenue in Q3," said Colette Kress, chief financial officer at Nvidia, during the company's earnings conference call with financial analysts and investors. "Having already received purchase orders from every major hyperscaler, AI cloud, and system OEM, we expect Vera Rubin to mark the fastest product ramp in Nvidia's history."

Data center revenue has accounted for around 92% of Nvidia's quarterly sales in recent quarters, so as long as Nvidia meets its $108 billion earnings projection in Q3, its data center revenue will reach around $99.36 billion, meaning that sales of its Vera Rubin platform hardware will be around $19.872 billion.

Nvidia began to ramp up production of Vera Rubin components — that include Vera CPUs, Rubin GPUs, BlueField 4 DPUs, and other units — this spring and commenced first revenue shipments of actual VR200 NVL72 racks in August, with Microsoft being the first to deploy commercial systems (at least according to Satya Nadella).

Normally, companies ramp up production and sales of their data center platforms for several quarters. Ramping up a data center platform from effectively no production revenue in Q2 FY2027 to 20% of revenue ($20 billion in this case) in just one quarter is a record not only for Nvidia, but perhaps for the whole industry, given Nvidia's scale. However, there is a catch: actual unit shipments do not look truly breakthrough.

Exact volumes of Vera Rubin units that Nvidia plans to ship in the third quarter of its fiscal 2027 are unknown. However, if Nvidia ships only VR200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, depending on their actual price and configuration (estimated from $5 million to $7.8 million per unit), Nvidia will supply from roughly 2,550 to approximately 3,975 machines containing 91,700 – 143,100 Vera CPUs as well as 183,500 – 286,100 Rubin GPUs.

These numbers are, of course, very rough since the company will sell a boatload of MGX servers and even Vera CPUs and Rubin GPUs separately, meaning that actual unit shipment volumes of these key components will be higher. Nonetheless, we are still talking about hundreds of thousands, rather than millions, of CPUs and GPUs, which is not particularly many. Still, given the stellar prices of leading-edge AI hardware, even relatively limited volumes of these components can generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

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