“AI Jesus” is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s latest nickname
Immediately 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 shows than for the sheer spectacle of the present.
GTC has come a good 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 lovers. The corporate, which had a market capitalization of about $10 billion on the time, attracted 1,500 individuals to the Fairmont San Jose Lodge, the nicest lodge within the downtown space.
On the time, no one knew that GPUs would turn out to be math accelerators important for powering the following technology of excessive efficiency computing (HPC), not to mention be the silicon upon which a multi-trillion-dollar business can be born.
Quick ahead 14 years, and each Nvidia and GTC have grown. Nvidia has turn out to be essentially the most beneficial firm on the earth with a market capitalization near $3 trillion, due to the close to monopoly that Nvidia holds on high-end GPUs required to coach and run AI fashions. And GTC has turn out to be the annual epicenter for all issues AI.
GTC 2025 attracted an estimated 25,000 individuals to downtown San Jose
In 2024, GTC was dubbed “The Woodstock of AI.” This yr, it’s turn out to be “The Tremendous Bowl of AI.” “All people wins on the Tremendous Bowl,” stated Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who the New York Occasions dubbed “AI Jesus.”
Earlier than the present, the Nvidia public relations crew estimated that 25,000 individuals would attend the five-day present, which takes place in and across the San Jose McEnery Conference Heart. Rooms on the two four-star motels related to the conference heart, the Marriott and the Hilton, crammed up first, and the encircling motels adopted.
Demand was so nice for the present that the final remaining lodge rooms within the downtown space have been going for a reported $2,500 per evening. (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 classes on a variety of subjects. Synthetic intelligence and all its incarnations (generative AI, agentic AI, predictive AI, even good outdated “machine studying”) was the large draw, in fact. However Nvidia has its palms in vary of industries, together with videogames, particular results, digital actuality, autonomous automobiles, excessive efficiency computing, and superior analytics. Bodily AI was its massive push this yr.
GTC 2025 featured two exhibit halls
The classes 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 classes, and served as a gathering space for distributors. Nevertheless, the 15-minute wait to rise up the elevator made it tough to for assembly members to get there on time. Some distributors that plunked down $40 grand for assembly rooms within the PwC constructing as an alternative used lodge lobbies as impromptu assembly areas–supplied you may 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, biggest tech development by no means will get outdated. The Hadoop hype bubble ultimately popped, regardless of having “some revolutionary concepts,” as Huang famous throughout his keynote. Will the AI bubble pop? And if that’s the case, when? Effectively, it’s not this week.
As downtown San Jose grew to become standing room solely, pedi-cabs did brisk enterprise shuttling individuals up and down San Carlos St., which SJPD closed off to vehicular site visitors during the present, angering some close by residents. Folks sauntered carelessly over practice tracks working down the center of the highway; due to a employee strike, San Jose’s gentle 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. Concert events occurred within the individuals’s plaza, and meals vans lined the rim.
Huang’s keynote tackle has all the time been a giant draw at GTC, however the conference heart now not has a room large enough. In 2019, Nvidia moved the keynote a half-mile east to San Jose State College’s area, the Provident Credit score Union Occasion Heart, which might seat as much as 6,500 individuals. 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 as a result of 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 individuals, and it seemed to be full once more in 2025.
Nevertheless, it’s not clear if even the SAP Heart is large enough for Nvidia. The corporate might wish to think about transferring the present up the highway to Levi’s Stadium, residence 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 strategy to maintain extra individuals in GTC is we’re going to must develop San Jose, and we’re engaged on it,” Huang stated throughout his keynote tackle. “We’ve quite a lot of land right here. We’ve acquired to develop San Jose.”
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