Nvidia took San Jose by storm this 12 months, with a record-breaking 25,000 attendees flocking to the San Jose Conference Heart and surrounding downtown buildings. Many workshops, talks, and panels had been so packed that individuals needed to lean towards partitions or sit on the ground — and undergo the wrath of organizers shouting instructions to get them to line up correctly.

Nvidia at the moment sits on the prime of the AI world, with record-breaking financials, sky-high revenue margins, and no critical opponents but. However the coming 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 venture confidence, unveiling powerful new chips, personal “supercomputers,” and, in fact, really cute robots. It was an exhaustive gross sales pitch – one aimed toward buyers reeling from Nvidia’s nosediving stock.

“The extra you purchase, the extra you save,” Huang stated 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

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 nearly the “entire world got it wrong” on traditional AI scaling falling out of vogue. Chinese language AI lab DeepSeek, which earlier this 12 months released a highly efficient “reasoning” model referred to as R1, prompted fears amongst buyers that Nvidia’s monster chips could now not be vital for coaching aggressive AI. 

However Huang has repeatedly insisted that power-hungry reasoning fashions will, in reality, drive extra demand for the corporate’s chips, not much less. That’s why at GTC, Huang showed 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 that Huang spent much less time addressing was upstarts like Cerebras, Groq, and different low-cost inference {hardware} and cloud suppliers. Almost each hyperscaler is creating a customized chip for inference, if not coaching, as nicely. AWS has Graviton and Inferentia (which it’s reportedly aggressively discounting), Google has TPUs, and Microsoft has Cobalt 100.

Alongside the identical vein, tech giants at the moment extraordinarily reliant on Nvidia chips, together with OpenAI and Meta, want to cut back these ties by way of in-house hardware efforts. In the event that they – and the aforementioned different rivals – are profitable, it’ll nearly assuredly weaken Nvidia’s stranglehold on the AI chips market.

That’s maybe why Nvidia’s share price dipped round 4% following Huang’s keynote. Traders may’ve been holding out hope for “one very last thing” — or maybe an accelerated launch window. In the long run, they received 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 harm” within the brief run. He stopped in need of promising that Nvidia can be shielded from the long-term financial impacts, nonetheless — no matter type they finally 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. Whereas that will assist the corporate diversify its provide chains, it’s additionally a large value for Nvidia, whose multitrillion-dollar valuation relies on wholesome revenue margins.

New enterprise

Because it seems to seed and develop companies apart from its core chips line, Nvidia at GTC drew consideration to its new investments in quantum, an business 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 recommended that the tech wouldn’t be very helpful for the following 15 to 30 years.

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that it will 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 outfitted with Nvidia chips, which the corporate says will allow researchers to simulate quantum techniques and the fashions vital for quantum error correction.

Within the extra fast future, Nvidia sees what it’s calling “personal 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 1000’s 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 stated 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 prospects agree.