Nvidia took San Jose by storm this 12 months, with a record-breaking 25,000 attendees flocking to the San Jose Conference Middle and surrounding downtown buildings. Many workshops, talks, and panels had been so packed that individuals 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 high of the AI world, with record-breaking financials, sky-high revenue margins, and no critical rivals but. However the coming months additionally maintain unprecedented danger for the corporate because it faces U.S. tariffs, DeepSeek, and shifting priorities from high AI clients.
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 aimed 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 growth
Greater 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 received’t decelerate anytime quickly.
Throughout his keynote, Huang claimed that just about the “whole world obtained it unsuitable” on conventional AI scaling falling out of vogue. Chinese language AI lab DeepSeek, which earlier this 12 months launched a extremely environment friendly “reasoning” mannequin known as R1, prompted fears amongst traders that Nvidia’s monster chips might not be crucial for coaching aggressive AI.
However 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 finest Blackwell chip.
The menace to Nvidia’s enterprise that Huang spent much less time addressing was upstarts like Cerebras, Groq, and different low-cost inference {hardware} and cloud suppliers. Practically each hyperscaler is creating 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.
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Alongside the identical vein, tech giants at present extraordinarily reliant on Nvidia chips, together with OpenAI and Meta, need to cut back these ties through in-house {hardware} efforts. In the event that 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 worth dipped round 4% following Huang’s keynote. Traders would possibly’ve been holding out hope for “one last item” — or maybe an accelerated launch window. In the long run, 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 “important injury” within the quick run. He stopped in need of promising that Nvidia can be shielded from the long-term financial impacts, nevertheless — no matter kind they in the end take.
Nvidia has clearly obtained the Trump Administration’s “America First” message, with Huang pledging at GTC to spend a whole lot of billions of {dollars} on manufacturing within the U.S. Whereas that may assist the corporate diversify its provide chains, it’s additionally an enormous price for Nvidia, whose multitrillion-dollar valuation depends upon wholesome revenue margins.
New enterprise
Because it appears to be like 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 firms for inflicting a minor inventory crash in January 2025 after he advised that the tech wouldn’t be very helpful for the subsequent 15 to 30 years.
Picture Credit:David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Pictures
On Tuesday, Nvidia introduced that it could open a brand new heart 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 crucial for quantum error correction.
Within the extra quick future, Nvidia sees what it’s calling “private AI supercomputers” as a possible new revenue-maker.
At GTC, the corporate launched DGX Spark (beforehand known as Challenge Digits) and DGX Station, each of that are designed to permit customers to prototype, fine-tune, and run AI fashions in a spread of sizes on the edge. Neither is strictly cheap – they retail for hundreds of {dollars} – however Huang boldly proclaimed that they characterize the way forward for the private PC.
“That is the pc of the age of AI,” Huang mentioned throughout his keynote. “That is what computer systems ought to appear like, and that is what computer systems will run sooner or later.”
We’ll quickly see if clients agree.
