“AI Jesus” is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s latest nickname
As we speak marks the tip of Nvidia’s GPU Expertise 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 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 person 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 trade can be born.
Quick ahead 14 years, and each Nvidia and GTC have grown. Nvidia has turn into probably the most beneficial 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 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.” “Everyone wins on the Tremendous Bowl,” mentioned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who the New York Instances 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 accommodations linked to the conference middle, the Marriott and the Hilton, crammed up first, and the encompassing accommodations adopted.
Demand was so nice for the present that the final remaining resort rooms within the downtown space had 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 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 fingers in vary of industries, together with videogames, particular results, digital actuality, autonomous autos, excessive efficiency computing, and superior analytics. Bodily AI was its large push this 12 months.
GTC 2025 featured two exhibit halls
The periods 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 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 individuals 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 means of the conference middle halls as echoes of previous Hadoop Worlds echoed in opposition to the partitions. Being on the epicenter of the newest, biggest tech pattern by no means will get previous. The Hadoop hype bubble finally 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. Folks sauntered carelessly over prepare tracks working down the center of the street; 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 means of a steel detector–smart precautions for the world’s richest firm. Concert events came about within the folks’s plaza, and meals vehicles lined the rim.
Huang’s keynote handle has all the time been a giant draw at GTC, however the conference middle not has a room large enough. 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 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 large 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 shifting 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 solution 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 handle. “Now we have a whole lot of land right here. We’ve acquired to develop San Jose.”
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