Nvidia took San Jose by storm this year, with a record-breaking 25,000 attendees flocking to the San Jose Convention Center and surrounding downtown buildings. Many workshops, talks, and panels were so packed that people had to lean against walls or sit on the floor — and suffer the wrath of organizers shouting commands to get them to line up properly.

Nvidia currently sits at the top of the AI world, with record-breaking financials, sky-high profit margins, and no serious competitors yet. But the coming months also hold unprecedented risk for the company as it faces U.S. tariffs, DeepSeek, and shifting priorities from top AI customers. 

At GTC 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attempted to project confidence, unveiling powerful new chips, personal “supercomputers,” and, of course, really cute robots. It was an exhaustive sales pitch – one aimed at investors reeling from Nvidia’s nosediving stock.

“The more you buy, the more you save,” Huang said at one point during a keynote on Tuesday. “It’s even better than that. Now, the more you buy, the more you make.”

Inference boom

More than anything, Nvidia at this year’s GTC sought to assure attendees – and the rest of the world watching – that demand for its chips won’t slow down anytime soon. 

During his keynote, Huang claimed that nearly the “entire world got it wrong” on traditional AI scaling falling out of vogue. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which earlier this year released a highly efficient “reasoning” model called R1, prompted fears among investors that Nvidia’s monster chips may no longer be necessary for training competitive AI. 

But Huang has repeatedly insisted that power-hungry reasoning models will, in fact, drive more demand for the company’s chips, not less. That’s why at GTC, Huang showed off Nvidia’s next line of Vera Rubin GPUs, claiming they’ll perform inference (that is, run AI models) at roughly double the rate of Nvidia’s current best Blackwell chip.

The threat to Nvidia’s business that Huang spent less time addressing was upstarts like Cerebras, Groq, and other low-cost inference hardware and cloud providers. Nearly every hyperscaler is developing a custom chip for inference, if not training, as well. AWS has Graviton and Inferentia (which it’s reportedly aggressively discounting), Google has TPUs, and Microsoft has Cobalt 100.

Along the same vein, tech giants currently extremely reliant on Nvidia chips, including OpenAI and Meta, are looking to reduce those ties via in-house hardware efforts. If they – and the aforementioned other rivals – are successful, it’ll almost assuredly weaken Nvidia’s stranglehold on the AI chips market.

That’s perhaps why Nvidia’s share price dipped around 4% following Huang’s keynote. Investors might’ve been holding out hope for “one last thing” — or perhaps an accelerated launch window. In the end, they got neither.

Tariff tensions

Nvidia also sought to allay worries about tariffs at GTC 2025.

The U.S. hasn’t imposed any tariffs on Taiwan (where Nvidia gets most of its chips), and Huang claimed tariffs wouldn’t do “significant damage” in the short run. He stopped short of promising that Nvidia would be shielded from the long-term economic impacts, however — whatever form they ultimately take.

Nvidia has clearly received the Trump Administration’s “America First” message, with Huang pledging at GTC to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on manufacturing in the U.S. While that would help the company diversify its supply chains, it’s also a massive cost for Nvidia, whose multitrillion-dollar valuation depends on healthy profit margins.

New business

As it looks to seed and grow businesses other than its core chips line, Nvidia at GTC drew attention to its new investments in quantum, an industry that the company has historically neglected. At GTC’s first Quantum Day, Huang apologized to the CEOs of major quantum companies for causing a minor stock crash in January 2025 after he suggested that the tech wouldn’t be very useful for the next 15 to 30 years.

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced that it would open a new center in Boston, NVAQC, to advance quantum computing in collaboration with “leading” hardware and software markers. The center will, of course, be equipped with Nvidia chips, which the company says will enable researchers to simulate quantum systems and the models necessary for quantum error correction.

In the more immediate future, Nvidia sees what it’s calling “personal AI supercomputers” as a potential new revenue-maker. 

At GTC, the company launched DGX Spark (previously called Project Digits) and DGX Station, both of which are designed to allow users to prototype, fine-tune, and run AI models in a range of sizes at the edge. Neither is exactly inexpensive – they retail for thousands of dollars – but Huang boldly proclaimed that they represent the future of the personal PC.  

“This is the computer of the age of AI,” Huang said during his keynote. “This is what computers should look like, and this is what computers will run in the future.”

We’ll soon see if customers agree.

Google is rolling out a new Gmail update that is designed to help you find the email you’re looking for more quickly. The company announced on Thursday that it will now use AI to consider factors like recency, most-clicked emails, and frequent contacts when surfacing emails based on your search query.

Up until now, Gmail has simply displayed emails in chronological order based on keywords.

“With this update, the emails you’re looking for are far more likely to be at the top of your search results — saving you valuable time and helping you find important information more easily,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Google is also introducing a new toggle so people can switch between “Most relevant” or “Most recent” emails on a search results page. The toggle is aimed at users who prefer seeing search results displayed in chronological order, rather than the new “Most relevant” default option.

The update is rolling out globally for users with personal Google accounts and is available on the web and in the Gmail app for Android and iOS. Google plans to expand the feature to business users in the future.

The launch of the new search functionality comes as Google has been building out its email offering to better compete with Apple’s Mail app, which got a slew of Gmail-like features with iOS 18 last year. For instance, Gmail recently gained a Gemini-powered feature that lets users add events to a Google Calendar directly from an email.

A few months ago, Gmail rolled out “Summary cards” that allow users to take actions in their inbox, like tracking packages, checking in for flights, setting reminders, marking bills as paid, and more.

Gmail also introduced the ability for users to chat with Gemini about their inbox directly within the app on both iOS and Android.

SoftBank Group announced on Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a chip designer founded by former Intel executive Renee James, through a $6.5 billion all-cash deal as a strategic move to broaden its investment in AI infrastructure.

Ampere will be operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank after the deal, which is expected to close in the second half of 2025.

Carlyle and Oracle, Ampere’s lead investors, will sell their shares in the Santa Clara, California startup. According to SoftBank’s statement, Carlyle holds a 59.65% stake while Oracle holds 32.27%. The startup employs 1,000 semiconductor engineers.

In 2021, SoftBank considered acquiring a minority stake in Ampere, which was then valued at $8 billion, per Bloomberg.

SoftBank is the largest shareholder of Arm Holdings, and Ampere has developed a server chip based on the ARM compute platform, positioning the two companies are strong partners. (Softbank acquired a British chip designer Arm for $32 billion in 2016, and it became publicly traded in 2023.) Ampere’s customers include Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, and Tencent, as well as companies like HPE and Supermicro.

SoftBank stated the Ampere acquisition will bolster its capabilities in key areas like AI and compute and expedite its growth initiatives. The most recent acquisition announcement follows a string of deals made by the Japanese tech mogul over the past few months, including its partnership with OpenAI to develop Advanced Enterprise AI called “Cristal intelligence.” SoftBank has also invested in the AI infrastructure project Stargate, which is building data centers for OpenAI across the U.S., and purchased an old Sharp factory in Japan.

“The future of Artificial Super Intelligence requires breakthrough computing power,” said Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp. “Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the United States.”

Ampere was founded in 2017 by James, who previously worked at Intel and private equity firm Carlyle and served on the board of Oracle. The company initially specialized in cloud-native computing but has since expanded its scope to include sustainable AI compute.

“With a shared vision for advancing AI, we are excited to join SoftBank Group and partner with its portfolio of leading technology companies,” said James. “This is a fantastic outcome for our team, and we are excited to drive forward our AmpereOne roadmap for high-performance Arm processors and AI.”