III
'In general, Nvidia made the case that the overall market opportunities for AI and AI data center infrastructure are expanding rapidly. Huang expects the industry will spend roughly $500 billion on data center capital expenditures this year, rising to more than $1 trillion by 2028, with Nvidia’s GPU chip business gaining a larger share of the spending in the coming years.
Part of that will come from the growing number of Nvidia GPUs inside data centers. These so-called superclusters have grown from 16,000 GPUs to over 100,000 GPUs during the past year. Huang told me he’s confident that several one-million-GPU clusters would be built by 2027.
Then there’s robotics. Nvidia executive Rev Lebaredian told me we’re just at the beginning of an exponential ramp-up in the development of AI robotics. The combination of rising computing power and smarter AI models is making large advances in robotics possible. He believes there will be millions of humanoid robots in use, especially by industrial companies, within five years. I have no particular insight into whether robots are, in fact, imminent. But if it happens, it’s one more degree of upside for Nvidia, which makes the hardware brains for robots.
Ultimately, the biggest development from GTC was Nvidia’s aggressive product road map. During his keynote, Huang announced that the company’s Blackwell Ultra AI server, available later this year, would outperform the current model by 50%. Then he said that the Vera Rubin AI server, scheduled for the second half of 2026, would be 3.3 times faster than Blackwell Ultra. The showstopper was the unveiling of the Rubin Ultra AI server—set for late 2027—with 14 times the performance of Blackwell Ultra. That figure drew gasps from the audience.
Somehow, Nvidia stock barely moved on the news and closed lower on Tuesday amid a general market decline. As a longtime Nvidia watcher, I’m confounded by the lack of enthusiasm from Wall Street. The tech crowd understood the significance; eventually investors will, too.'