Artificial intelligence (AI) tech leader NVIDIA's (NVDA +1.63%) flagship GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2025 has arrived. It will run Monday through Friday at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. This annual happening is widely considered the world's leading AI event. Nvidia expects about 25,000 attendees in-person and 300,000 virtually.
CEO Jensen Huang will deliver the keynote address at the SAP Center in San Jose on Tuesday, March 18, at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. Folks who are not attending can watch virtually as the event will be livestreamed for free. (The livestream -- and a recording after the event -- will be accessible on Nvidia's investor relation website.)
Nvidia stock got a modest boost from last year's flagship GTC, as the chart below shows. Given the stock's pullback in 2025, investors are surely hoping for a repeat performance this year. (As of Friday, March 14, Nvidia stock is 18.6% off its all-time closing high, reached on Jan. 6.)
GTC 2024 was held Sunday, March 17, through Thursday, March 21, 2024. Friday, March 22, is included in the chart since many investors would still be digesting the data shared at the event, and some Wall Street analysts might still be tweaking their target prices. Data by YCharts.
What can investors expect from GTC 2025?
Investors can look forward to Nvidia announcing many new products and partnerships across its target markets: data center, gaming, automotive/robotics, and professional visualization (pro viz). The data center platform is likely to get the lion's share of conference time because it is Nvidia's largest and fastest-growing business. Moreover, it's the most heavily involved in AI.
For context, in the company's first quarter of fiscal 2026 (ended Jan. 26, 2025), the data center platform generated 90.5% of Nvidia's total revenue, with gaming, auto/robotics, and pro viz accounting for 6.5%, 1.4%, and 1.3%, respectively, of total revenue. (Total doesn't add up to 100% because Nvidia has a small "other" category.)
More specifically, investors can expect Nvidia to provide details about its next two generations of graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing AI and high-performance computing workloads: Blackwell Ultra and Rubin. Blackwell Ultra is slated to launch in the second half of this calendar year and Rubin -- which will have a new architecture -- is scheduled for a calendar-year 2026 release. Nvidia recently increased its cadence for launching new generations of data center GPUs to annually from about every other year.
Investors can expect Blackwell Ultra to have increased processing power compared to Blackwell, and can anticipate an even greater step-up from Blackwell Ultra to Rubin (named after American astronomer Vera Rubin). Demand for Nvidia's Blackwell chips has been "extraordinary," as Huang said on the company's fiscal Q1 earnings call in late February, and investors should be able to look forward to similarly powerful demand for Blackwell Ultra and Rubin.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
Impressive slate of speakers
The event includes an impressive slate of speakers from:
- Nvidia and other big-name public companies ranging from the Big Techs to top consumer goods companies. I'm guessing some of the consumer products companies that will be represented are using Nvidia's tech to deploy AI agents, as the relatively new agentic AI space is taking off rapidly.
- Start-ups that have been garnering much attention recently, including OpenAI. OpenAI's late 2023 launch of its GPT chatbot demonstrated generative AI's amazing capabilities. This event triggered a stampede among companies to obtain Nvidia's GPUs for enabling generative AI.
- Academics and government officials working in AI and related realms.
For those interested in autonomous vehicles, I'll call out these speakers: RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian and Drago Anguelov, V.P. and head of research at Waymo, Alphabet's driverless vehicle subsidiary.
I'm particularly looking forward to the speakers who will talk about robotics as I believe humanoid robots will be the next Big Thing (along with self-driving vehicles).
Quantum Day on March 20
Nvidia is holding its first Quantum Day at GTC on Thursday, March 20. Huang will host a panel of leaders from the quantum computing industry from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT. This event will be livestreamed and available on demand.
The promise of quantum computing is that it will be able to solve problems that current classical computers cannot, but there are major "bugs" to be worked out. Nvidia is doing work in the quantum space along with partners. These partnerships are primarily aimed at developing "hybrid" computers that use classical chips (GPUs) and quantum chips (qubits).
