GTC felt extra bullish than ever, however Nvidia’s challenges are piling up
Nvidia took San Jose by storm this yr, 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 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 severe rivals but. However the coming months additionally maintain unprecedented threat 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 aimed toward buyers 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 yr’s GTC sought to guarantee attendees – and the remainder of the world watching – that demand for its chips gained’t decelerate anytime quickly.
Throughout his keynote, Huang claimed that almost the “total world acquired it flawed” on conventional AI scaling falling out of vogue. Chinese language AI lab DeepSeek, which earlier this yr launched a extremely environment friendly “reasoning” mannequin known as R1, prompted fears amongst buyers that Nvidia’s monster chips could now not be mandatory for coaching aggressive AI.
However Huang has repeatedly insisted that power-hungry reasoning fashions will, in truth, 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 Huang spent much less time addressing was upstarts like Cerebras, Groq, and different low-cost inference {hardware} and cloud suppliers. Practically each hyperscaler is growing 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, wish to cut back these ties through 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 value dipped round 4% following Huang’s keynote. Buyers may’ve been holding out hope for “one last item” — or maybe an accelerated launch window. Ultimately, they acquired 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 quick run. He stopped in need of promising that Nvidia can be shielded from the long-term financial impacts, nevertheless — no matter type they finally 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 might 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 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 firms for inflicting a minor inventory crash in January 2025 after he steered that the tech wouldn’t be very helpful for the following 15 to 30 years.
On Tuesday, Nvidia introduced that it could 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 outfitted with Nvidia chips, which the corporate says will allow researchers to simulate quantum methods and the fashions mandatory 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 Undertaking 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 precisely cheap – they retail for hundreds of {dollars} – however Huang boldly proclaimed that they signify the way forward for the non-public PC.
“That is the pc of the age of AI,” Huang mentioned throughout his keynote. “That is what computer systems ought to appear to be, and that is what computer systems will run sooner or later.”
We’ll quickly see if prospects agree.
