“AI Jesus” is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s latest nickname
In the present day 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 displays 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 fans. 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 subsequent era of excessive efficiency computing (HPC), not to mention be the silicon upon which a multi-trillion-dollar trade can be born.
Quick ahead 14 years, and each Nvidia and GTC have grown. Nvidia has change into probably the most precious firm on the planet 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 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,” 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 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 resorts linked to the conference heart, the Marriott and the Hilton, crammed up first, and the encircling resorts 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 evening. (For comparability, tickets for the 2025 Tremendous Bowl began out going for about $3,000 every. Perhaps the NFL will dub the subsequent 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 previous “machine studying”) was the large draw, after all. However Nvidia has its fingers in vary of industries, together with videogames, particular results, digital actuality, autonomous autos, excessive efficiency computing, and superior analytics. Bodily AI was its huge 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. Nonetheless, the 15-minute wait to rise up the elevator made it tough to for assembly individuals 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 possibly can discover a chair. So many distributors confirmed up for GTC {that a} second expo corridor was arrange.
Throngs of excited GTC-ers filed by means of the conference heart halls as echoes of previous Hadoop Worlds echoed in opposition to the partitions. Being on the epicenter of the newest, best tech development 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? Nicely, 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 during the present, angering some close by residents. Individuals sauntered carelessly over practice tracks working down the center of the street; due to 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. Getting into each space required bag checks and a stroll by means of a metallic detector–smart precautions for the world’s richest firm. Live shows befell within the folks’s plaza, and meals vans lined the rim.
Huang’s keynote deal with has all the time been an enormous 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 may seat as much as 6,500 folks. However that supplied solely a brief 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 huge 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 large enough for Nvidia. The corporate might need to take into account transferring the present up the street to Levi’s Stadium, house 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 technique 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 deal with. “We now have loads of land right here. We’ve acquired to develop San Jose.”
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