Today · announcement October 21

Google plans up to 960,000 Rubin GPUs; no timeline is given

NVIDIA writes that Google Cloud's Vera Rubin instance A5X goes generally available next month, and that Google plans to scale to as many as 960,000 Rubin GPUs, a planned ceiling rather than a deployed count. A5X is a Google Cloud instance built from NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks. The October 21 issue reported that Google had opened its TPU software to PyTorch the day before, so in-house chips and NVIDIA purchases are moving forward in parallel. NVIDIA's post: "Google Cloud plans to scale its Vera Rubin-based infrastructure to as many as 960,000 Rubin GPUs across multiple sites." (NVIDIA, 2026-10-21). The post gives no timeline or deployed count for the 960,000, and doesn't say whether all of them are A5X. Ineffable Intelligence, founded by AlphaGo author David Silver to do large-scale reinforcement learning, is A5X's first customer. An Ineffable co-founder said on October 13 that Ineffable was among the first customers of "GCP's largest cluster." NVIDIA's post confirms the first-customer status and the November timing; NVIDIA doesn't use the word "largest," and neither side gives the cluster's size. The same post says Google Cloud will be among the first clouds to offer NVIDIA rack-scale confidential computing on bare metal. That bare-metal item is also Google's plan as relayed by NVIDIA; Google's own blog post hasn't been reviewed. Whether A5X reaches general availability in November, as NVIDIA says, is the next checkable point. How we checked →

Concept illustration: on the left, a row of brick-red cabinets stands under a black header lettered VERA RUBIN, and one door carries a white plate with a green emblem and the lettering NVIDIA; in front, a sagging rope between two black posts holds a sign lettered A5X. On the right, a large pale board with a dot at each corner has a black header lettered GOOGLE CLOUD beside a multicoloured cloud emblem, and under it a row of white, outline-drawn cabinet doors with small handles runs off the right edge.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 22, 2026, alongside 15 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Google plans up to 960,000 Rubin GPUs; no timeline is given." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-22-2/. Accessed access date.