The San Jose Convention Center is at the center of the AI universe this week as it hosts the annual NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) GTC conference – dubbed the Super Bowl of AI.
The highlight of the week-long event is the keynote speech delivered by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday night. In the two-hour address, Huang introduced new data center chips and an AI supercomputer, among other initiatives.
But nothing seemed to move the needle for investors, as NVIDIA stock was down about 3% in pre-market trading. But when the market opened on Wednesday, investors had time to digest the information and the stock price was rising, up about 1% at the open.
New Vera Rubin Chips
The new chips Huang discussed are called the Vera Rubin chips, which are designed to drive performance gains and efficiency improvements in AI data centers. Named after astronomer Vera Rubin, the next-generation NVIDIA Rubin Ultra GPU and NVIDIA Vera CPU architectures will be faster and more powerful than the Blackwell AI chips.
“Basically everything is brand new except for the chassis,” Huang said. “You can see that Rubin is going to drive the cost down tremendously.”
The first wave of Vera Rubin chips will come out in the second half of 2026, followed by the Rubin Ultra chips in the second half of 2027.
Huang said this will be part of the annual rhythm for the buildout of AI infrastructure, with new GPUs, CPUs and accelerated computing advancements coming out each year.
In the second half of this year, NVIDIA will roll out the next version of Blackwell chips, Blackwell Ultra. NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra boosts training and test-time scaling inference, which means it applies more compute power during inference to improve accuracy. They will also enable organizations to accelerate applications such as AI reasoning, agentic AI and physical AI.
Blackwell delivers a “giant leap” in inference performance, Huang said. And to further accelerate inference on a large scale, Huang announced NVIDIA Dynamo, open-source software for accelerating and scaling AI reasoning models in AI factories.
“Inference is going to be one of the most important workloads in the next decade as we scale out AI,” Huang said.
And he sees data center revenue accelerating overall, driven by the rise of reasoning AI and agentic AI – which is AI powered by AI agents.
“I’ve said before that I expect data center build-out to reach $1 trillion. And I am fairly certain we’re going to reach that very soon,” he told the crowd, adding that AI is at an inflection point.
AI Supercomputers
In addition, the NVIDIA CEO introduced two new AI personal supercomputers, powered by the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform. The two new computers are the DGX Spark and DGX Station, which will enable AI developers, researchers, data scientists and students to prototype, fine-tune and inference large models on desktops. The computers will be developed with ASUS, Dell (NYSE:DELL), HP (NYSE:HPQ), and Lenovo.
“AI has transformed every layer of the computing stack. It stands to reason a new class of computers would emerge — designed for AI-native developers and to run AI-native applications,” Huang said. “With these new DGX personal AI computers, AI can span from cloud services to desktop and edge applications.”
DGX Spark computers can be reserved today, while the DGX Station computers will be available later this year.
Investor Reaction
After the markets had time to digest Huang’s wide-ranging address, investors began buying in, as the stock ticked up 1.5%.
Some analysts were bullish about NVIDIA’s future, based on Huang’s outlook. Analysts at JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) said NVIDIA remains one or two steps ahead of competitors, while BofA analysts said it continues to deepen its competitive moat. Citi analyst Atif Malik also gave it high marks.
“Net-net, we came out of the keynote reassured in Nvidia’s leadership which if anything seems to be expanding. We view positively Nvidia’s push for inference which per company comments now requires significantly more compute,” Malik said.
With its valuation down to 39, NVIDIA stock is looking more and more like a buy right now. Analysts have a median price target of $175, which would be a 49% increase.