Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on what’s next for the AI boom

Huang’s GTC keynote pitched an AI economy built on inference, tokens, and agentic systems — with Nvidia selling the factory floor where all of that work runs

Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

Before Jensen Huang even got to his leather-jacket entrance at this year’s GTC, Nvidia $NVDA had already started selling the myth. The preshow soundtrack sounded suspiciously custom-built for a coronation — lyrics about amazing things arriving on schedule, legends being made, the future showing up right on cue; songs even Shazam couldn’t identify. (The first AI demo of the day could very well have been the playlist.) Half the room had phones raised for Huang’s entrance like Silicon Valley had booked its own arena act. For one afternoon, the San Jose Sharks’ home rink belonged to a different kind of power play. Because Huang walked onstage and did what he does best: turned a product keynote into a zoning hearing for the future.

The Nvidia founder opened GTC by promising a tour through “every single layer” of AI, then spent the next couple of hours arguing that the company isn’t just selling chips into a hot market. Nope. The company wants to define the whole physical plant of the AI economy: the compute, the networking, the storage, the software, the models, the factories, and — because subtlety is clearly out of season — maybe even the (still theoretical) data centers way up in space.

The keynote sprayed announcements in every direction, but the real message was tighter. Huang wanted investors, customers, and rivals to hear four things clearly: AI demand is still climbing fast enough to justify outrageous amounts of spending; inference is now the center of the battlefield; agents are supposed to spill out of chatbots and into the daily machinery of office work; and the next gold rush after digital AI could be physical AI, where robots, autonomous systems and industrial software burn through even more data and infrastructure. You can’t spell Nvidia without AI.

Huang opened where he usually opens when the market starts wondering whether Nvidia’s moat might someday spring a leak: software. He spent the early stretch reminding everyone that CUDA is 20 years old, that Nvidia’s installed base sits “in every cloud” and “every computer company.” Nvidia’s strongest shield is still the software ecosystem wrapped around the silicon, not the green rectangles by themselves. 

That logic shaped the rest of the speech. Huang lingered on structured data, called it the “ground truth” of enterprise computing, and said that AI can finally make use of the ocean of unstructured information — PDFs, videos, speech, all the corporate attic junk companies have hoarded for years without really knowing how to search or monetize. Watch out, world; Nvidia wants a claim on the database, too.

GTC isn’t just about a faster, better chip anymore. This year’s big speech was about Nvidia’s attempt to become the company that owns the economics of AI work itself — the chips, the storage, the networking, the orchestration layer, the digital twin, the open-model politics, the agent runtime, and whatever comes after the data center once Earth starts feeling crowded. GTC 2026 was an........

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