Reporter’s Notebook: AI Hype and Glory at Nvidia GTC 2025

Today marks the end of Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2025, a weeklong event in San Jose, California that be remembered for a long time, if not for the content of the presentations than for the sheer spectacle of the show.

GTC has come a long way since Nvidia held the first show back in 2009. Back then, it was a relatively obscure chipmaker selling graphics card used primarily by videogame enthusiasts. The company, which had a market capitalization of about $10 billion at the time, attracted 1,500 people to the Fairmont San Jose Hotel, the nicest hotel in the downtown area.

At the time, nobody knew that GPUs would become math accelerators essential for powering the next generation of high performance computing (HPC), let alone be the silicon upon which a multi-trillion-dollar industry would be born.

Fast forward 14 years, and both Nvidia and GTC have grown. Nvidia has become the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization close to $3 trillion, thanks to the near monopoly that Nvidia holds on high-end GPUs required to train and run AI models. And GTC has become the annual epicenter for all things AI.

GTC 2025 attracted an estimated 25,000 people to downtown San Jose

In 2024, GTC was dubbed “The Woodstock of AI.” This year, it’s become “The Super Bowl of AI.” “Everybody wins at the Super Bowl,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who the New York Times dubbed “AI Jesus.”

Before the show, the Nvidia public relations team estimated that 25,000 people would attend the five-day show, which takes place in and around the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Rooms at the two four-star hotels connected to the convention center, the Marriott and the Hilton, filled up first, and the surrounding hotels followed.

Demand was so great for the show that the last remaining hotel rooms in the downtown area were going for a reported $2,500 per night. (For comparison, tickets for the 2025 Super Bowl started out going for about $3,000 each. Maybe the NFL will dub the next Super Bowl “The GTC of Football.”)

GTC 2025 brought more than 1,000 sessions on a range of topics. Artificial intelligence and all its incarnations (generative AI, agentic AI, predictive AI, even good old “machine learning”) was the big draw, of course. But Nvidia has its hands in range of industries, including videogames, special effects, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, high performance computing, and advanced analytics. Physical AI was its big push this year.

GTC 2025 featured two exhibit halls

The sessions filled up all the rooms at the convention center–and then some. The PwC building down the street from the convention center also hosted sessions, and served as a meeting area for vendors. However, the 15-minute wait to get up the elevator made it difficult to for meeting participants to get there on time. Some vendors that plunked down $40 grand for meeting rooms in the PwC building instead used hotel lobbies as impromptu meeting areas–provided you could find a chair. So many vendors showed up for GTC that a second expo hall was set up.

Throngs of excited GTC-ers filed through the convention center halls as echoes of past Hadoop Worlds echoed against the walls. Being at the epicenter of the latest, greatest tech trend never gets old. The Hadoop hype bubble eventually popped, despite having “some revolutionary ideas,” as Huang noted during his keynote. Will the AI bubble pop? And if so, when? Well, it’s not this week.

As downtown San Jose became standing room only, pedi-cabs did brisk business shuttling people up and down San Carlos St., which SJPD closed off to vehicular traffic for the duration of the show, angering some nearby residents. People sauntered carelessly over train tracks running down the middle of the road; thanks to a worker strike, San Jose’s light rail system was shut down for “the Super Bowl of AI.” Everyone got their steps in.

The Plaza de Cesar Chavez was roped off to feed lunch to hordes of hungry convention-goers. Entering every area required bag checks and a walk through a metal detector–sensible precautions for the world’s richest company. Concerts took place in the people’s plaza, and food trucks lined the rim.

Huang’s keynote address has always been a big draw at GTC, but the convention center no longer has a room big enough. In 2019, Nvidia moved the keynote a half-mile east to San Jose State University’s arena, the Provident Credit Union Event Center, which can seat up to 6,500 people. But that provided only a temporary reprieve.

Huang fired t-shirts to adoring fans before his GTC 2025 keynote on March 18, 2025

When Nvidia held its next physical GTC conference following four years of virtual events due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it decided to go big and host the keynote at the SAP Center, half a mile west from the convention center. The home of the San Jose Sharks seats more than 17,000 people, and it appeared to be full again in 2025.

However, it’s not clear if even the SAP Center is big enough for Nvidia. The company may want to consider moving the show up the road to Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, which has seating for nearly 70,000.

If GTC 2025 didn’t break San Jose, then it came pretty close. “The only way to hold more people in GTC is we’re going to have to grow San Jose, and we’re working on it,” Huang said during his keynote address. “We have a lot of land here. We’ve got to grow San Jose.”

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