The week in chip news: Nvidia's GTC 2025 blitz, new NVMe HDDs and watercooled SSD, Intel's restructuring begins

Nvidia's GTC 2025, an annual event where the company lays out its roadmap of new products and vision for the coming year, created a flood of news as the company extended its roadmap out to a four-year horizon with plenty of mind-bendingly powerful new AI GPUs and systems.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also clarified the company's recent maneuvers behind the scenes, including that it is now building production silicon in the US in TSMC's Arizona fab, and he also threw cold water on rumors of Nvidia's participation in a supposed industry consortium that would take over rival company Intel's chipmaking fabs. That news comes as Intel begins shuffling its foundry management structure under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

Nvidia's GTC has developed its own gravity, and many other companies are also now using the event to make their own announcements. This year, we found quite a few interesting developments on the storage front, including a demo for PCIe-connected NVMe hard drives, the first production liquid-cooled SSDs, and a new Toshiba SSD that's bursting at the seams with 122 TB of capacity. Let's dive in.

Nvidia's GTC 2025 Blitz

Nvidia is dominating not only the AI market, but also the entire fabless chipmaker realm. Early in the week, we learned that Nvidia's explosive growth equates to making nearly as much revenue as its next nine fabless competitors combined last year. Yes, that includes big names like AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek, among others.

That was an impressive start to the news cycle for GTC 2025 week, but the real fireworks began the following day when Nvidia unveiled its new roadmap. Nvidia announced its new Rubin GPUs for 2026, Rubin Ultra in 2027, and teased an all-new Feynman architecture that will arrive in 2028, extending its public roadmap out to a four-year window, which Jensen claimed is "something no other technology CEO has ever done before." That included the headline announcement of the company's next-gen Blackwell Ultra B3000 GPUs.

Looking out to Nvidia's most exotic high-powered AI systems, the company had its future Rubin Ultra systems on display, and we had the chance to get up close and personal with the new rack design. These powerful GPUs will come with four reticle-sized GPU dies (the largest chips that can be made with existing chipmaking tools) crammed into a single package fused with 1TB of HBM4E memory.

Those massive chips will be combined with Nvidia's 88-core CPUs and crammed into Kyber racks, consuming up to 600,000 Watts (600kW) of power apiece. That will push Nvidia SuperPODS up to multi-megawatts of power consumption.

That pushes performance density to once-unthinkable levels, but power constraints are already a pressing issue for new and existing data centers alike: Most data center projects are now limited by how much power they can access from the grid. As Kyber shows, this will become a more critical issue soon — these systems are expected to land in the second half of 2027.

Naturally, tying together massive clusters of GPUs brings complex challenges, but Nvidia plans for future clusters to communicate at the speed of light. To that end, the company unveiled its Spectrum-X Photonics and Quantum-X Photonics networking switch platforms. These photonics platforms deliver an incredible 1.6 Tb/s of bandwidth per port, or up to 400 Tb/s in aggregate, thus allowing up to millions of GPUs to operate in a single cluster.

As usual, though, some of the biggest storylines from Nvidia didn't stem from its product announcements but rather from its plans for the future. One pertains to TSMC, as Nvidia announced that it is now running production silicon through TSMC fabs in Arizona (it's also producing some Blackwell systems in the US, too), but Nvidia also shared details, or rather lack thereof, about Intel.

Jensen throws cold water on Intel consortium rumors as company begins restructuring moves

Jensen threw cold water on rumors that it was asked to be in an industry consortium that supposedly included AMD, Broadcom, and Qualcomm. This would help TSMC take over the Intel Foundry chipmaking operations. Jensen denied that he had been asked to join a consortium, saying, "Nobody has invited us to a consortium. [...] There might be a party. I was not invited."

That's good news for Intel, which made news of its own as Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has now taken the helm with a $1 million yearly salary plus a whopping potential total of $68 million in bonuses.

Later in the week, Intel told us that Ann Kelleher, the EVP responsible for developing Intel’s chip fabrication technologies, would retire by the end of the year. Intel had previously laid out a public succession plan for Kelleher, but the company decided to reorganize the Intel Foundry operations as part of the changeover. It isn't clear how much of the new organizational structure was architected by Lip-Bu Tan, but he clearly executed the new plan mere days after he assumed his new role as CEO.

Perhaps we'll see more similarly decisive actions at Intel soon as Tan enacts a turnaround plan. Meanwhile, Intel ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger stopped by GTC to repeat his claim that Jensen "got lucky with AI." Gelsinger also lamented Intel's past indecisive execution of his Larabee GPU project, which was famously killed after he left the company.

Old HDDs learn a new NVMe jam while SSDs get liquid cooling

HBM memories attract all the attention for AI GPUs and accelerators, but the massive data training sets have to be stored somewhere, and storage solutions tailored specifically for AI use cases are now proliferating.

I'm always a sucker for high-capacity SSDs, and Kioxia's new PCIe 5.0 LC9 certainly fits that bill. Kioxia announced the new 122.88TB SSD at the show, and it packs a big performance that matches the big capacity with up to 15 GB/s of bandwidth on tap.

Seagate also had a proof-of-concept demo that included NVMe HDDs. When it comes to NVMe, we naturally think of SSDs, but HDDs with the interface have been under development for quite some time. Extra performance isn't the goal, though. Seagate says utilizing the NVMe interface will enable scaling pools of SSDs up to the exabyte level by utilizing the fast and flexible NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) protocol. When deployed into software-controlled tiered storage systems in tandem with NVMe SSDs, Seagate thinks it has the winning formula for top-tier AI server storage performance.

Finally, the 'world's first' liquid-cooled enterprise SSD debuted at the event. We've seen more than a few different takes on watercooled SSDs for the consumer market. Still, none of them are designed for the harsh environments or the stringent reliability metrics needed for servers. Solidigm's D7-PS10101 E1.S is watercooled but also hot-swappable, meaning it can be changed without shutting down the server, thus also meeting critical serviceability criteria for AI data centers that can't miss a beat.

Jensen Huang also was up to his usual antics as he served food from the Denny's food truck to attendees, and there were far too many other product announcements to cover here. Head to our GTC 2025 page for more details on the other new hardware announcements and deep-dive specs.