Nvidia made a significant impact in San Jose this year, attracting a record-breaking 25,000 attendees to the San Jose Convention Center and surrounding downtown facilities. Many of the workshops, talks, and panels were so crowded that attendees stood against walls, sat on the floor, and navigated directives from organizers attempting to manage the crowd.
Currently positioned at the forefront of the AI industry, Nvidia boasts impressive financial results and high profit margins, facing limited competition. However, the company could encounter significant challenges in the coming months due to U.S. tariffs, competition from entities like DeepSeek, and evolving priorities of top AI customers.
At GTC 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang aimed to convey confidence, introducing powerful new chips, personal AI “supercomputers,” and appealing robots. This presentation was part of a broader effort to reassure investors amid declining stock performance.
Huang emphasized during a keynote, “The more you buy, the more you save,” and added, “It’s even better than that. Now, the more you buy, the more you make.”
A central theme of this year’s GTC was Nvidia’s assurance that chip demand would remain strong. Huang asserted during his keynote that traditional AI scaling approaches had been largely misunderstood, which has sparked investor concerns, especially after Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released an efficient reasoning model, R1, that might reduce the necessity for Nvidia’s powerful chips in AI training.
Despite this, Huang reiterated that reasoning models would likely increase demand for Nvidia’s chips. Consequently, he unveiled the next line of Vera Rubin GPUs, positioned to perform inference tasks at roughly double the speed of Nvidia’s current leading Blackwell chip.
Less focus was given to challenges posed by smaller companies like Cerebras, Groq, and various low-cost hardware and cloud service providers entering the market. Many major tech companies, such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft, are developing their own chips for AI tasks, posing potential threats to Nvidia’s market position.
Several major tech companies relying heavily on Nvidia chips, like OpenAI and Meta, are exploring in-house hardware solutions, which could erode Nvidia’s dominance in the market for AI chips.
Following Huang’s keynote, Nvidia experienced a 4% drop in share price, as investors possibly anticipated more groundbreaking developments or accelerated timelines.
Regarding tariff concerns, Nvidia addressed the potential impacts at GTC 2025. While the U.S. has not imposed tariffs on Taiwan, where Nvidia sources most of its chips, Huang stated that tariffs would not cause significant short-term damage. However, he avoided guaranteeing protection against long-term economic effects.
Reflecting an “America First” sentiment, Huang pledged substantial investments in U.S. manufacturing, an initiative aimed at diversifying supply chains but presenting massive costs to Nvidia, whose valuation relies on maintaining healthy profit margins.
Nvidia also highlighted new ventures beyond its chip business, promoting its investments in quantum computing. During the inaugural Quantum Day at GTC, Huang apologized to industry leaders for previously underestimating quantum computing’s utility in the near future.
The company announced the establishment of a new center in Boston, aimed at advancing quantum computing research in partnership with leading hardware and software firms. Nvidia plans to equip the facility with its own chips to support quantum system simulations and error correction model development.
In the short term, Nvidia envisions “personal AI supercomputers” as a promising revenue stream. At GTC, the company introduced DGX Spark and DGX Station, both designed for prototyping and executing AI models on a smaller scale. These devices are premium-priced, but Huang asserted they represent the future of personal computing.
“This is the computer of the age of AI,” Huang stated. “This is what computers should look like, and this is what computers will run in the future.”
The company eagerly awaits market reception to these new products.
