- Nvidia’s big AI conference, GTC 2025, kicked off in full on Tuesday.
- CEO Jensen Huang gave an update on Nvidia’s road map, including launch timing for AI chips Blackwell Ultra and Rubin.
- He announced the Dynamo Open-Source system, a GM partnership, and showed off a robot powered by a physics engine made in partnership with Disney and Google Deepmind.
Nvidia’s “Super Bowl of AI” is here.
CEO Jensen Huang took the stage in San Jose on Tuesday to give the opening keynote address at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 AI conference.
“What an amazing year it was, and we have a lot of incredible things to talk about,” Huang said. “And I just want you to know that I’m up here without a net. There are no scripts, there’s no teleprompter, and I’ve got a lot of things to cover. So let’s get started.”
Huang said GTC used to be compared to Woodstock, but now it’s being compared to the Super Bowl.
“The only difference is, everybody wins at this Super Bowl,” Huang said onstage.
During the Nvidia CEO’s highly technical presentation lasting more than 2 hours — which you can watch below — Huang talked about Nvidia’s upcoming AI chipsets and architectures, including the next-generation Blackwell Ultra and AI superchip Vera Rubin platform, as well as the chipmaker’s work in robotics and autonomous driving.
Oh, and a robot called “Blue” definitely stole the show, getting the audience on its feet and filming with their phones — more on that later.
Nvidia’s road map for next-generation AI chips
The biggest thing Wall Street was looking for on Tuesday was an update on Nvidia’s launch pipeline for its cutting-edge AI chips, used by many Big Tech and AI startups to develop frontier AI models.
Nvidia is preparing for the transition from Blackwell to Blackwell Ultra, which is expected to launch later this year. During Nvidia’s most recent earnings call, Huang said that Blackwell demand has been “extraordinary” after a “hiccup” in early production.
The company is also readying its AI superchip platform Rubin, which the company named after astronomer Vera Rubin, whose discoveries have been credited as evidence for the existence of dark matter. Huang first unveiled the Rubin platform last year at Computex.
The Nvidia CEO gave updates to its launch timeline as well as what’s coming next.
Vera Rubin will be coming in the second half of 2026, Huang said.
Nvidia
The platform has a new CPU and networking architecture, twice the performance of Hopper, and more memory.
“Basically everything is brand new, except for the chassis,” Huang said.
Huang said Vera Rubin Ultra, the next generation of Vera Rubin, will be available in the second half of 2027.
Nvidia shows off a robot to demonstrate new partnership with Disney and Google Deepmind
The most exciting moment of the sprawling presentation came at the very end when Huang showed off a cute robot he called “Blue.”
The robot, which looked like something out of a “Star Wars” movie, had two Nvidia computers inside it and walked around Huang, beeped and nodding its head. People in the audience were on their feet to see the demo and filming with their phones.
Blue was shown off to demonstrate Nvidia’s new partnership with Google DeepMind and Disney Research.
Nvidia
The collaboration will focus on building a new open-source robotics physics engine called Newton.
“We need a physics engine that is designed for very fine-grain, rigid and soft bodies, designed for being able to train tactile feedback and fine motor skills and actuator controls,” Huang said.
Newton will power MuJoCo, which “will accelerate robotics machine learning workloads by more than 70x,” compared to its existing GPU-accelerated simulator.
However, don’t expect to own your own “Blue” anytime soon — the robot isn’t a consumer product.
Huang announces Dynamo open-source system, a GM partnership, and more
Huang also announced Nvidia Dynamo, an open-source inference software to help accelerate and scale AI reasoning models.
The Nvidia CEO referred to Dynamo as “essentially the operating system of an AI factory.” The system is named after the first instrument that started the last Industrial Revolution, he added.
Huang added that Perplexity, one of his “favorite partners” is working with Nvidia on Dynamo.
“Love them so much because the revolutionary work that they do, and also because Aravind such a great guy,” Huang said about Perplexity and its CEO Aravind Srinivas.
Nvidia also announced it’s partnering with General Motors to “build custom AI systems using Nvidia accelerated compute platforms,” including vehicles, factories, and robots.
Nvidia’s GPUs have powered the AI gold rush, with the company’s first-generation AI chip, Hopper, reportedly selling for upwards of $40,000 and quickly becoming a hot commodity. However, recent advancements like Chinese startup DeepSeek’s lower-cost AI model have raised questions about the level of infrastructure investment needed to drive frontier LLM development.
On stage, Huang told the audience that he expects growing demand for AI compute. In an example Huang presented, he said a reasoning model like Deepseek’s R1 required 20 times more tokens to make a wedding seating chart than a traditional LLM model.
While Huang repeatedly emphasized that he believed there was plenty of runway for scaling AI, and that Nvidia was well-positioned to capitalize on demand for chips to power the latest advancements, it wasn’t clear if Wall Street was satisfied.
Nvidia’s stock was trading down throughout the presentation and closed down more than 3% on Tuesday.
