Nvidia took San Jose by storm this 12 months, with a record-breaking 25,000 attendees flocking to the San Jose Convention Center and surrounding downtown buildings. Many workshops, talks, and panels had been so packed that folks needed to lean in opposition to partitions or sit on the ground — and endure the wrath of organizers shouting instructions to get them to line up correctly.
Nvidia at present sits on the prime of the AI world, with record-breaking financials, sky-high revenue margins, and no critical opponents but. But the approaching months additionally maintain unprecedented danger for the corporate because it faces U.S. tariffs, DeepSeek, and shifting priorities from prime AI prospects.
At GTC 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tried to challenge confidence, unveiling highly effective new chips, private “supercomputers,” and, in fact, actually cute robots. It was an exhaustive gross sales pitch – one geared toward traders reeling from Nvidia’s nosediving inventory.
“The extra you purchase, the extra you save,” Huang mentioned at one level throughout a keynote on Tuesday. “It’s even higher than that. Now, the extra you purchase, the extra you make.”
Inference increase
More than something, Nvidia at this 12 months’s GTC sought to guarantee attendees – and the remainder of the world watching – that demand for its chips gained’t decelerate anytime quickly.
During his keynote, Huang claimed that almost the “whole world obtained it fallacious” on conventional AI scaling falling out of vogue. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which earlier this 12 months launched a extremely environment friendly “reasoning” mannequin referred to as R1, prompted fears amongst traders that Nvidia’s monster chips might now not be essential for coaching aggressive AI.
But Huang has repeatedly insisted that power-hungry reasoning fashions will, in actual fact, drive extra demand for the corporate’s chips, not much less. That’s why at GTC, Huang confirmed off Nvidia’s subsequent line of Vera Rubin GPUs, claiming they’ll carry out inference (that’s, run AI fashions) at roughly double the speed of Nvidia’s present greatest Blackwell chip.
The risk to Nvidia’s enterprise Huang spent much less time addressing was upstarts like Cerebras, Groq, and different low-cost inference {hardware} and cloud suppliers. Nearly each hyperscaler is growing a customized chip for inference, if not coaching, as properly. AWS has Graviton and Inferentia (which it’s reportedly aggressively discounting), Google has TPUs, and Microsoft has Cobalt 100.
Along the identical vein, tech giants at present extraordinarily reliant on Nvidia chips, together with OpenAI and Meta, want to scale back these ties through in-house {hardware} efforts. If they – and the aforementioned different rivals – are profitable, it’ll virtually assuredly weaken Nvidia’s stranglehold on the AI chips market.
That’s maybe why Nvidia’s share value dipped round 4% following Huang’s keynote. Investors would possibly’ve been holding out hope for “one last item” — or maybe an accelerated launch window. In the top, they obtained neither.
Tariff tensions
Nvidia additionally sought to allay worries about tariffs at GTC 2025.
The U.S. hasn’t imposed any tariffs on Taiwan (the place Nvidia will get most of its chips), and Huang claimed tariffs wouldn’t do “vital injury” within the brief run. He stopped wanting promising that Nvidia could be shielded from the long-term financial impacts, nevertheless — no matter type they in the end take.
Nvidia has clearly acquired the Trump Administration’s “America First” message, with Huang pledging at GTC to spend tons of of billions of {dollars} on manufacturing within the U.S. While that will assist the corporate diversify its provide chains, it’s additionally an enormous value for Nvidia, whose multitrillion-dollar valuation is determined by wholesome revenue margins.
New enterprise
As it seems to be to seed and develop companies aside from its core chips line, Nvidia at GTC drew consideration to its new investments in quantum, an trade that the corporate has traditionally uncared for. At GTC’s first Quantum Day, Huang apologized to the CEOs of main quantum corporations for inflicting a minor inventory crash in January 2025 after he recommended that the tech wouldn’t be very helpful for the following 15 to 30 years.
On Tuesday, Nvidia introduced that it might open a brand new middle in Boston, NVAQC, to advance quantum computing in collaboration with “main” {hardware} and software program markers. The middle will, in fact, be geared up with Nvidia chips, which the corporate says will allow researchers to simulate quantum methods and the fashions essential for quantum error correction.
In the extra speedy future, Nvidia sees what it’s calling “private AI supercomputers” as a possible new revenue-maker.
At GTC, the corporate launched DGX Spark (beforehand referred to as Project Digits) and DGX Station, each of that are designed to permit customers to prototype, fine-tune, and run AI fashions in a variety of sizes on the edge. Neither is strictly cheap – they retail for hundreds of {dollars} – however Huang boldly proclaimed that they signify the way forward for the non-public PC.
“This is the pc of the age of AI,” Huang mentioned throughout his keynote. “This is what computer systems ought to seem like, and that is what computer systems will run sooner or later.”
We’ll quickly see if prospects agree.
