“AI Jesus” is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s latest nickname
At present marks the top of Nvidia’s GPU Know-how Convention (GTC) 2025, a weeklong occasion in San Jose, California that be remembered for a very long time, if not for the content material of the displays than for the sheer spectacle of the present.
GTC has come a great distance since Nvidia held the primary present again in 2009. Again then, it was a comparatively obscure chipmaker promoting graphics card used primarily by videogame fanatics. The corporate, which had a market capitalization of about $10 billion on the time, attracted 1,500 folks to the Fairmont San Jose Lodge, the nicest resort within the downtown space.
On the time, no one knew that GPUs would change into math accelerators important for powering the following era of excessive efficiency computing (HPC), not to mention be the silicon upon which a multi-trillion-dollar business could be born.
Quick ahead 14 years, and each Nvidia and GTC have grown. Nvidia has change into probably the most beneficial firm on this planet with a market capitalization near $3 trillion, because of the close to monopoly that Nvidia holds on high-end GPUs required to coach and run AI fashions. And GTC has change into the annual epicenter for all issues AI.
GTC 2025 attracted an estimated 25,000 folks to downtown San Jose
In 2024, GTC was dubbed “The Woodstock of AI.” This yr, it’s change into “The Tremendous Bowl of AI.” “All people wins on the Tremendous Bowl,” mentioned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who the New York Occasions dubbed “AI Jesus.”
Earlier than the present, the Nvidia public relations group estimated that 25,000 folks would attend the five-day present, which takes place in and across the San Jose McEnery Conference Heart. Rooms on the two four-star inns related to the conference heart, the Marriott and the Hilton, crammed up first, and the encompassing inns adopted.
Demand was so nice for the present that the final remaining resort rooms within the downtown space have been going for a reported $2,500 per night time. (For comparability, tickets for the 2025 Tremendous Bowl began out going for about $3,000 every. Possibly the NFL will dub the following Tremendous Bowl “The GTC of Soccer.”)
GTC 2025 introduced greater than 1,000 periods on a variety of subjects. Synthetic intelligence and all its incarnations (generative AI, agentic AI, predictive AI, even good previous “machine studying”) was the massive draw, after all. However Nvidia has its arms in vary of industries, together with videogames, particular results, digital actuality, autonomous autos, excessive efficiency computing, and superior analytics. Bodily AI was its massive push this yr.
GTC 2025 featured two exhibit halls
The periods crammed up all of the rooms on the conference heart–after which some. The PwC constructing down the road from the conference heart additionally hosted periods, and served as a gathering space for distributors. Nonetheless, the 15-minute wait to stand up the elevator made it tough to for assembly contributors to get there on time. Some distributors that plunked down $40 grand for assembly rooms within the PwC constructing as a substitute used resort lobbies as impromptu assembly areas–supplied you would discover a chair. So many distributors confirmed up for GTC {that a} second expo corridor was arrange.
Throngs of excited GTC-ers filed by the conference heart halls as echoes of previous Hadoop Worlds echoed towards the partitions. Being on the epicenter of the newest, best tech pattern by no means will get previous. The Hadoop hype bubble ultimately popped, regardless of having “some revolutionary concepts,” as Huang famous throughout his keynote. Will the AI bubble pop? And in that case, when? Properly, it’s not this week.
As downtown San Jose turned standing room solely, pedi-cabs did brisk enterprise shuttling folks up and down San Carlos St., which SJPD closed off to vehicular site visitors during the present, angering some close by residents. Individuals sauntered carelessly over practice tracks operating down the center of the highway; because of a employee strike, San Jose’s mild rail system was shut down for “the Tremendous Bowl of AI.” Everybody acquired their steps in.
The Plaza de Cesar Chavez was roped off to feed lunch to hordes of hungry convention-goers. Coming into each space required bag checks and a stroll by a steel detector–smart precautions for the world’s richest firm. Live shows came about within the folks’s plaza, and meals vehicles lined the rim.
Huang’s keynote tackle has all the time been an enormous draw at GTC, however the conference heart now not has a room sufficiently big. In 2019, Nvidia moved the keynote a half-mile east to San Jose State College’s enviornment, the Provident Credit score Union Occasion Heart, which might seat as much as 6,500 folks. However that supplied solely a short lived reprieve.
Huang fired t-shirts to adoring followers earlier than his GTC 2025 keynote on March 18, 2025
When Nvidia held its subsequent bodily GTC convention following 4 years of digital occasions because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it determined to go massive and host the keynote on the SAP Heart, half a mile west from the conference heart. The house of the San Jose Sharks seats greater than 17,000 folks, and it gave the impression to be full once more in 2025.
Nonetheless, it’s not clear if even the SAP Heart is sufficiently big for Nvidia. The corporate could wish to think about transferring the present up the highway to Levi’s Stadium, house of the San Francisco 49ers, which has seating for almost 70,000.
If GTC 2025 didn’t break San Jose, then it got here fairly shut. “The one method to maintain extra folks in GTC is we’re going to must develop San Jose, and we’re engaged on it,” Huang mentioned throughout his keynote tackle. “We’ve a variety of land right here. We’ve acquired to develop San Jose.”
Associated Gadgets:
Nvidia Preps for 100x Surge in Inference Workloads, Due to Reasoning AI Brokers
The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says
Nvidia Touts Subsequent Era GPU Superchip and New Photonic Switches
[ad_2]