Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at the tech giant’s GTC Washington, D.C. conference wearing his usual black leather jacket, but he might as well have gotten his go-to outfit from a red mega-cap.
In a nearly two-hour keynote here at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Huang touted NVIDIA’s current and upcoming advances in AI computing by announcing several new partners, adding the Trump administration to the list.
Huang took a nationalist tone early on in the conference, which he called the “Super Bowl of AI.” They announced the first in a series of partnerships, a plan with Nokia to build gear for 6G networks that Nokia predicts will enter service by 2030.
After decades of U.S. innovation, today’s wireless networks are now “largely deployed on foreign technologies,” the CEO said, a step ahead, citing bipartisan concerns over Chinese and Russian influence in 5G standards and network hardware.
“It has to stop,” Huang said.
The Nokia partnership, which includes NVIDIA investing $1 billion in the Finnish firm, will export a platform called Arc. It’s an acronym that punches in other acronyms: “Aerial RAIN (Radio Access Network) Computer”—defined as a software-defined 6G base station.
“For the first time, we’ll be able to use AI technology, AI for AI, to make radio communications even better,” he predicted.
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‘A fundamental advance’
Next, Huang turned to a tech frontier he’s been skeptical about before. “The industry has made a fundamental advance,” he said, nodding to recent advances in quantum equivalents in classical computing, except that it’s “coherent, stable and error-correct” to work with.
NVIDIA’s latest contribution to the field is a system architecture called NVQLINK that can integrate quantum processing units with GPUs and traditional CPUs, integrating error correction for the critical output of a quantum computer.
Nvidia describes its partners as ‘my friends everywhere.’ (Credit: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Eight Department of Energy labs will work with NVIDIA to experiment with the technology, and Huang further announced that Nokia will collaborate with Oracle to build seven new AI supercomputers for DOE labs to apply that level of processing power to some of the toughest science problems. “These scientific supercomputers aren’t going to run chatbots,” Huang said. “They’re going to do basic science.”
All of this AI infrastructure demands a lot of power, which isn’t great for home electricity rates, and Huang took a moment to praise the current administration for its energy policies. “President Trump deserves tremendous credit for throwing the nation’s weight behind pro-energy growth,” he said.
“We would be in a bad place if it didn’t happen, and I want to thank President Trump for that,” Huang declared.
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Huang’s description calls for clarification: While Trump has been a controversial supporter of fossil fuels as well as nuclear power, as seen in his AI Action Plan, his open hostility to solar and wind power has led to the cancellation of renewable energy projects that would have added gigawatts of electric grid capacity.
Huang returned to the message about the merits of AI, comparing it to traditional software that exists as a tool for use in a specific task: “AI is not a tool; AI is work.” Now that companies are willing to pay a premium for AI’s ability to advance their work, he said AI has reached a “virtuous cycle” stage. “The more profit that’s generated, the more compute that puts on the grid,” he said.
Huang confirmed that NVIDIA’s current Grace Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin GPU platforms will help speed spin by making AI cheaper to use.
“The speed difference is incredible,” he said of the company’s Grace Blackwell NVL72, citing SemiAnalysis benchmark tests that found it gained 10 times the performance per dollar and watt of NVIDIA’s older H200 NLV8.
With more progress in Rubin, NVIDIA projects the two platforms to reach $500 billion in sales in 2025 and 2026 combined.
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A video highlighted how manufacturing partners like TSMC, SK Hanks, and Foxconn are now making Blackwell hardware at US facilities, and Huang thanked Trump again for that. “The first thing President Trump asked me about is, bring back manufacturing,” he said. “Nine months later, we are now manufacturing in full Blackwell production in Arizona.”
But bringing back hardware manufacturing is not a new plot twist that began under this administration. Congress passed the Chips and Science Act of 2022 under President Biden to encourage this industrial transformation, including billions of dollars in subsidies and incentives, with TSMC and SK Hanks among the big beneficiaries.
Bring on the robots
Huang has a grand vision for the humanoid robot. (Credit: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
After recapping NVIDIA’s work in using its Omniverse platform to develop “AI factory” data centers and new partnerships with defense tech firm Planetair and security firm MobStrike, Huang turned to discussing NVIDIA’s hopes for robotics.
There are robots that interact with humans, such as Tesla’s Humid, the much-hyped Optimus and Disney’s BDX Droid, a more diminutive robot that evokes Pixar’s rambunctious heroes. Wall-E.
The entire category remains a steamroller at the consumer level, but Huang voiced a level of optimism that echoes Metaverse CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s already-caught Metaverse predictions: “It’s going to be the largest consumer electronics product line in the world.”
Another is robotaxis, which is now a commercial reality in a growing number of cities.
“There’s a robot that’s clearly at an inflection point,” Huang said ahead of the Nvidia Drive AGX Hyperion, a platform the company is developing to make cars “robotaxis-ready.” Stellants, parent firms such as Chrysler and Fiat, Mercedes-Benz, and EV maker Lucid, are along for the ride, he said.
Huang wrapped up the keynote with another grace note for the president, who, like many, kept misinterpreting the company’s name as “Noah Vidya,” prompting audience members to mega-shout: “Thank you all for your service and making America great again.”
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Rob Piguraro writes about the exciting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecoms, and other things that beep or blink. He has covered such developments as the evolution of cell phones from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo competitor to verb status, and the transformation of social media from a composer forum to Facebook’s billions of users. Peguraro has met most of the founders of the Internet and once received a verbatim email reply from Steve Jobs.
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