“AI Jesus” is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s latest nickname
As we speak marks the tip 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 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 lovers. The corporate, which had a market capitalization of about $10 billion on the time, attracted 1,500 folks to the Fairmont San Jose Resort, the nicest resort within the downtown space.
On the time, no one knew that GPUs would turn 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 turn into probably the most priceless firm on the earth 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 turn 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 12 months, it’s turn into “The Tremendous Bowl of AI.” “All people wins on the Tremendous Bowl,” stated Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who the New York Instances dubbed “AI Jesus.”
Earlier than the present, the Nvidia public relations staff 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 lodges linked to the conference middle, the Marriott and the Hilton, crammed up first, and the encircling lodges 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. Perhaps the NFL will dub the following Tremendous Bowl “The GTC of Soccer.”)
GTC 2025 introduced greater than 1,000 classes on a spread of matters. Synthetic intelligence and all its incarnations (generative AI, agentic AI, predictive AI, even good outdated “machine studying”) was the massive draw, in fact. However Nvidia has its palms 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 12 months.
GTC 2025 featured two exhibit halls
The classes crammed up all of the rooms on the conference middle–after which some. The PwC constructing down the road from the conference middle additionally hosted classes, and served as a gathering space for distributors. Nonetheless, the 15-minute wait to rise up the elevator made it troublesome to for assembly contributors to get there on time. Some distributors that plunked down $40 grand for assembly rooms within the PwC constructing as an alternative used resort lobbies as impromptu assembly areas–offered you might discover a chair. So many distributors confirmed up for GTC {that a} second expo corridor was arrange.
Throngs of excited GTC-ers filed by way of the conference middle halls as echoes of previous Hadoop Worlds echoed towards the partitions. Being on the epicenter of the most recent, best tech pattern 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 folks up and down San Carlos St., which SJPD closed off to vehicular site visitors all through the present, angering some close by residents. Individuals sauntered carelessly over prepare tracks operating down the center of the street; because of 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 way of a metallic detector–wise 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 at all times been a giant draw at GTC, however the conference middle 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 folks. However that offered 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 middle. 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 large enough for Nvidia. The corporate could need to contemplate transferring the present up the street to Levi’s Stadium, residence of the San Francisco 49ers, which has seating for practically 70,000.
If GTC 2025 didn’t break San Jose, then it got here fairly shut. “The one strategy to maintain extra folks 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 got quite a lot of land right here. We’ve acquired to develop San Jose.”
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