Nvidia's GTC was CEO Jensen Huang's big moment
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang might as well have pitched a flag in the ground during his keynote at the company’s GTC conference on Monday, declaring that the chip giant is not only the go-to AI firm of today, but also the key for tech’s future.
Over the course of the two-hour presentation, the CEO rattled off a raft of new Nvidia technologies, including its next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture, to a crowd so large it packed the rafters of San Jose’s SAP Center.
I’ve been to my fair share of tech events over the years, and this was the first time in quite a while that attendees gave off an overwhelming sense of excitement and anticipation for what was to come.
Huang used the moment as a victory lap for Nvidia, going over how the company went from a video game powerhouse to an AI darling. He extolled the virtues and opportunities of generative AI, recalled how Nvidia’s early investments helped kick off the modern AI race in 2012, and noted how it’s powering the conversation today.
Those investments have indeed paid off in the form of massive sales increases. In its last fiscal quarter, Nvidia reported data center revenue of $18.4 billion, a 217% increase from the same period last year when it reported data center revenue of $3.62 billion.
These gains have painted Nvidia’s stock chart into a Matterhorn, with shares of the company up more than 500% since the start of 2023. All of a sudden, Nvidia is the third-most-valuable company in the world by market capitalization, ahead of giants like Saudi Aramco, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta.
The biggest moment of the show came early, as the CEO took the wraps off of Nvidia’s new chips. Nvidia’s GB200 Superchip and its “Blackwell” architecture will offer up to a 30x performance increase compared to the Nvidia H100 GPU for large language model inference workloads while using up to 25x less energy, which would make AI more efficient and cheaper.
Huang also showed off the company’s DGX SuperPOD supercomputer setup, which uses piped liquid coolant instead of traditional fan-based cooling. It’s a reminder that the company isn’t just a chip company, or even a software one, but also a larger engineering organization innovating at multiple levels.
The CEO spent a good deal of his keynote hitting on some of the finer points of the math and science behind how Nvidia’s GPUs operate. And besides the engineers and scientists in the crowd, the information seemed to go over many attendees’ heads.
It makes sense that Huang would hit on those topics, though. GTC is a developer conference, after all — not a consumer one — and you will not be going out and ordering a bag of Nvidia chips. But developers need to know the nitty gritty of what the company’s chips can do.
Still, it was interesting to see who in the audience was nerding out to the numbers and calculations and who was there for the broader strokes of Nvidia’s product roadmap.
After showing off a litany of AI software designed for everything from Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to self-driving cars, Huang debuted the company’s GR00T foundation model for humanoid robots. The system is meant to serve as the brains behind these human-like robots, helping them understand human language and mimic human movements.
It’s not clear when or if GR00T, which stands for Generalist Robot 00 Technology, will take off as a go-to AI system for robots. After all, we’re still in the early stages of humanoid robot development. But Huang is clearly making the case that Nvidia should be the company to help power the segment going forward.
All of this comes as Nvidia keeps its eyes on a growing field of competitors. Longtime rival AMD is also building out AI enterprise chips and technologies, and Intel is working to steal away its own piece of Nvidia’s pie.
At the same time, Nvidia’s customers are also working on their own AI graphics chips. Two of them, Amazon and Google, have already deployed their own cards in their respective data centers. And two more, Microsoft and Meta, are developing their chips for future use.
For now, though, the company continues to hold on to its position as the industry leader in AI hardware and software. And Huang seems dead set on staying there.
Daniel Howley is the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielHowley.
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