GTC felt more bullish than ever, but Nvidia’s challenges are piling up

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 have been so packed that individuals needed to lean towards partitions or sit on the ground — and endure the wrath of organizers shouting instructions to get them to line up correctly.

Nvidia at present 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 venture confidence, unveiling powerful new chips, personal “supercomputers,” and, after all, really cute robots. It was an exhaustive gross sales pitch – one aimed toward traders reeling from Nvidia’s nosediving stock.

“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 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 known as R1, prompted fears amongst traders that Nvidia’s monster chips could now not be needed 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 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 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 properly. 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 present extraordinarily reliant on Nvidia chips, together with OpenAI and Meta, need to scale 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. Buyers would possibly’ve been holding out hope for “one final thing” — 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 injury” within the brief run. He stopped wanting promising that Nvidia can be shielded from the long-term financial impacts, nonetheless — no matter type they in the end take.

Nvidia has clearly obtained the Trump Administration’s “America First” message, with Huang pledging at GTC to spend lots of of billions of {dollars} on manufacturing within the U.S. Whereas that may assist the corporate diversify its provide chains, it’s additionally an enormous price for Nvidia, whose multitrillion-dollar valuation relies on wholesome revenue margins.

New enterprise

Because it appears to seed and develop companies aside 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 prompt that the tech wouldn’t be very helpful for the following 15 to 30 years.

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that it could open a brand new heart in Boston, NVAQC, to advance quantum computing in collaboration with “main” {hardware} and software program markers. The middle will, after all, be outfitted with Nvidia chips, which the corporate says will allow researchers to simulate quantum programs and the fashions needed for quantum error correction.

Within the extra quick future, Nvidia sees what it’s calling “personal AI supercomputers” as a possible new revenue-maker. 

At GTC, the corporate launched DGX Spark (beforehand known 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 precisely cheap – they retail for hundreds of {dollars} – however Huang boldly proclaimed that they symbolize 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 like, and that is what computer systems will run sooner or later.”

We’ll quickly see if prospects agree.