NVIDIA CEO hypes up GTC 2026, promises to unveil a chip that will "surprise the world"

NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang has teased a "world-surprising" chip that the company plans to reveal at GTC 2026 next month. He dropped this information during an exclusive interview with The Korea Economic Daily following a dinner with SK Hynix engineers in Santa Clara. The CEO expressed confidence in the upcoming event scheduled for March 16 in San Jose and hinted that the new hardware pushes current physics to their limit.

While the CEO did not actually name the product, something based on the Rubin architecture isn't exactly a bad guess. Rubin was first teased back in June 2024 at Computex and formally unveiled at GTC 2025. NVIDIA even showcased physical hardware just last month at CES.

This architecture focuses on eliminating memory bottlenecks through high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) integration. Reports indicate NVIDIA is working closely with SK Hynix to stack this memory directly onto the GPU logic die. This would arguably be the most complex mass-produced chip in history.

Another possibility, albeit less likely, is an early look at the Feynman architecture. Feynman is the platform slated to follow Rubin around 2028 and was first added to the company's roadmap at GTC in 2025.

It is rumored to tackle the "Moore's Law limit" by introducing technologies like silicon photonics, which uses light for data transfer instead of electricity, and will be built on TSMC's A16 (1.6nm) manufacturing process. If Huang shows a working prototype of this tech two years early, that would certainly qualify as a surprise.

Huang's promise of a world-surprising chip comes amid intense competition from rivals like AMD and the maturing custom silicon from Google (TPU), Amazon (Trainium), and Microsoft (Maia).

These chips have started closing the performance gap in specific workloads, giving customers real alternatives. There's also the growing fear in the AI industry that progress has hit a scaling wall, where adding more GPUs provides diminishing returns in model intelligence.

Source: The Korea Economic Daily

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Posted Thursday 19 February 2026 at 5:46 am AEST (my time).

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