NVIDIA BlueField-4 Processor at Hot Chips 2026

NVIDIA is on stage at Hot Chips 2026, walking through its BlueField-4 Processor, the fourth generation of its data center processing unit. I think we are getting more of the Grace with ConnectX-9 version, not the bigger Vera version, so that is neat.

This is being done live, so please excuse any typos. BlueField-4 sits inside NVIDIA’s larger argument that agentic AI is the most complex computing workload yet. NVIDIA positions the DPU as the component that ties the CPU, GPU, and network together, enabling an agent to run through the observe, reason, and act steps. I think this is the third time we have seen this image at Hot Chips? NVIDIA frames BlueField-4 within the Vera Rubin platform, which it describes as a full-stack AI factory spread across seven chips and five racks. BlueField-4 is one of those seven chips, working alongside the Vera CPU and Spectrum-6. Again, it seems like one we have seen before. Here, NVIDIA has a DPU handling networking, security, and storage in every data center node. General-purpose compute and business logic run on the CPU, while parallel AI and HPC workloads run on the GPU. NVIDIA casts the DPU as the trusted entity of the platform, a server in front of the server that isolates the host from the data center fabric and owns the tenant data path. That framing is central to everything that follows in the talk. Scale-up is the domain NVIDIA covers through NVLink, letting multiple GPUs operate as one system inside a tenant. That keeps GPUs fed within a single node before any fabric comes into play. Scale-out is where the fabric takes over, spanning ConnectX and Spectrum-X switches to turn the data center into a single unit of compute. NVIDIA keeps scale-up and scale-out as separate layers here before introducing scale-in later.