The NVIDIA GTC keynote felt like a tech

I was at GTC in San Jose. In the arena. Third row.

Jensen Huang walked on stage in the leather jacket. The crowd erupted. Not politely. Not like a conference keynote. Like a concert. Whistles, cheering, phones out. For a 61-year-old CEO of a semiconductor company.

For two hours, he held up chips, announced products, showed benchmarks, and told the audience that they were building the future. The audience believed him. I believed him. Sitting there, in that room, with that energy, it was hard not to.

And that’s what made me uncomfortable.

The spectacle

NVIDIA has turned a technical product launch into an experience. The stage design is elaborate. The lighting is dramatic. Jensen’s presentation style, conversational, confident, building to reveals, is calibrated for maximum impact.

When he held up the B200 GPU and said “This is the world’s most powerful chip,” the arena cheered like he’d just hit a home run. A chip. A piece of silicon. Getting a standing ovation.

I cheered too. I already mentioned that. What I didn’t mention is that afterward, walking out of the arena, I felt the same post-event clarity you feel after leaving any high-energy performance. The realization that you were swept up in something. That the emotion was real but the evaluation was suspended.

The substance

To be clear: the substance is real. NVIDIA’s products are extraordinary. The H100 is the most important chip in the AI era. The B200 is a significant improvement. The software stack (CUDA, cuDNN, TensorRT) is unmatched. Jensen isn’t selling hype. He’s selling the best product in the market.

But the presentation wraps that substance in a narrative that goes beyond product capability. Jensen’s GTC keynote isn’t “here’s our new chip and its specs.” It’s “the future of intelligence depends on what we build together.” The pronoun shift from “we” (NVIDIA) to “we” (all of us, humanity) is smooth. You leave feeling like you’re part of a mission, not a customer at a product launch.

That’s effective marketing. It’s also the structure of a sermon. A leader on stage. A community gathered. A shared belief in something larger than the individual. A call to participate.

The trillion-dollar question

NVIDIA is worth over $2 trillion. The valuation is based on the assumption that AI demand will continue growing, that NVIDIA will maintain its dominant market share, and that the applications of AI will justify the hardware investment.

Those assumptions might be right. The demand for AI compute is real and growing. The applications are proliferating. The models keep getting better and the use cases keep expanding.

But “might be right” and “definitely right” are different things. And the energy at GTC, the cheering, the excitement, the quasi-religious fervor, makes it hard to think critically about the assumptions.

I noticed something at GTC. The questions from the audience during Q&A were almost never skeptical. Nobody asked “what if AI scaling plateaus?” Nobody asked “what happens to demand if the next generation of models isn’t significantly better?” Nobody asked “what if your customers start building their own chips?”

The room was true believers. And true believers don’t ask heretical questions.

My position

I own no NVIDIA stock. I think their products are the best in the market. I think Jensen is one of the most effective CEOs in technology. I think the AI hardware market will continue to grow.

I also think that any room where thousands of people cheer for a product launch without a single skeptical question is a room that’s running on faith as much as analysis.

The chips are real. The demand is real. The competition is real (AMD, Intel, Google, Amazon are all building alternatives). Whether the current valuation accurately reflects the future, or whether it reflects the energy of a room full of believers who just watched their leader hold up silicon like a sacrament, I genuinely don’t know.

I drove home from GTC with the leather jacket image stuck in my head. The chip, raised up. The crowd, rising to its feet. The light, catching the surface of the package.

It was a hell of a show. Whether it was a product launch or a sermon, I’m still deciding.

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