Nvidia took San Jose by storm this yr, 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 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 high of the AI world, with record-breaking financials, sky-high revenue margins, and no critical rivals but. But the approaching months additionally maintain unprecedented danger for the corporate because it faces U.S. tariffs, DeepSeek, and shifting priorities from high AI prospects.
At GTC 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tried to venture 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 more you buy, the more you save,” Huang stated at one level throughout a keynote on Tuesday. “It’s even better than that. Now, the more you buy, the more you make.”
Inference growth
More 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.
During his keynote, Huang claimed that almost the “entire world got it wrong” on conventional AI scaling falling out of vogue. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which earlier this yr launched a extremely environment friendly “reasoning” mannequin referred to as R1, prompted fears amongst traders that Nvidia’s monster chips might now not be crucial for coaching aggressive AI.
But 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 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 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. Nearly each hyperscaler is growing a customized chip for inference, if not coaching, as effectively. 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 the moment extraordinarily reliant on Nvidia chips, together with OpenAI and Meta, need to cut back these ties through in-house {hardware} efforts. If 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. Investors would possibly’ve been holding out hope for “one last thing” — or maybe an accelerated launch window. In the tip, 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 “significant damage” within the quick run. He stopped wanting promising that Nvidia can be shielded from the long-term financial impacts, nevertheless — no matter kind they finally take.
Nvidia has clearly acquired the Trump Administration’s “America First” message, with Huang pledging at GTC to spend a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} on manufacturing within the U.S. While 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
As it seems to be 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,
