Nvidia GTC (GPU Technology Conference) is a global artificial intelligence (AI) conference for developers that brings together developers, engineers, researchers, inventors, and IT professionals.[1] Topics focus on AI, computer graphics, data science, machine learning and autonomous machines. Each conference begins with a keynote from Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang, followed by a variety of sessions and talks with experts from around the world.
It originated in 2009 in San Jose, California, with an initial focus on the potential for solving computing challenges through GPUs.[2] In recent years, the conference focus has shifted to various applications of artificial intelligence and deep learning, including: self-driving cars, healthcare, high performance computing, professional visualization, and Nvidia Deep Learning Institute (DLI) training.[3]
History
The first GTC was held from September 30 to October 2, 2009 at the Fairmont San Jose hotel and attracted roughly 1,500 attendees.[4][5] The first GTC was so wildly popular that it ended up hosting "several hundred more people" than expected, forcing Nvidia to "shut down registration" at two weeks before the conference.[4] The New York Times later described the atmosphere at the first GTC as akin to a science fair, where academics presented their work on posters.[6]
Since GTC 2009, Nvidia has used the much larger San Jose Convention Center as GTC's primary venue. Along with Nvidia, GTC's size and prominence greatly increased during the AI boom.
According to Nvidia, Huang starts to plan his keynote address about two months before each GTC, to identify what announcements he will make and what things he will present or demonstrate on the stage.[6] But Huang "speaks extemporaneously" while on stage, does not use a script, and does not rehearse in advance.[6]
GTC 2018 attracted over 8,400 attendees. Due to the COVID pandemic of 2020, GTC 2020 was converted to a digital event and drew roughly 59,000 registrants. The 2021 GTC keynote, which was streamed on YouTube on April 12, included a portion that was made with CGI using the Nvidia Omniverse real-time rendering platform. Due to the photorealism of the event, including a model of CEO Jensen Huang, news outlets reported not being able to discern that a portion of the keynote was CGI until later revealed in a blog post on August 11.[7]
GTC 2025 drew about 25,000 attendees to San Jose.[6] To accommodate demand, Huang delivered his keynote address down the street at a hockey arena, SAP Center, which can hold about 17,000 people.[8] By then, GTC and its host company had shifted focus so sharply from graphics to artificial intelligence that Huang himself called GTC the "Super Bowl of A.I."[9] Nvidia wrapped Downtown San Jose in its "neon green and black colors".[6] Demand for San Jose hotel rooms drove prices as high as $2,500 per night.[9] One sign that GTC had evolved from a programmer-oriented developer conference into an executive-oriented business conference for networking and negotiating AI deals was that it took 35 minutes just to get into a nearby building set aside for business meetings.[8] There were long lines everywhere inside the San Jose Convention Center, meaning that GTC may be getting too big for the center.[8] In a joint promotion with Nvidia, Denny's parked its Mobile Diner outside the SAP Center before Huang's keynote address on March 18 and gave out free food samples to celebrate the fact that Nvidia was founded in a booth in a Denny's diner.[8][10] On March 18, Nvidia also held a night market inspired by Huang's well-known affection for Taiwanese night markets.[8] Thus, on March 18, hard-core attendees had to survive a grueling 12-hour schedule of events to get the full GTC experience.[8]
| Year | Dates | Location | Notable speakers | Announcements |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Sep 30–Oct 2 | San Jose, CA | Jensen Huang; Richard Kerris; Jon Peddie; Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University | Fermi microarchitecture;[11][12] Maybe first keynote ever in 3D; double precision n body simulation demo |
| 2010 | Sep 20–23 | San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, CA | Jensen Huang; Sebastian Thrun, robotics at Stanford and engineer at Google; Klaus Schulten, computational biologist, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | DX11 Tessellation; Iray on 3DSMax; CUDA x86; Matlab CUDA Accelerated Parallel Computing Toolbox; CUDA roadmap revealed through Maxwell; Quadro graphics cards for video gaming [13] |
| 2011 | Dec 14–15 | China[14] | Jensen Huang | CUDA[15][16] |
| 2012 | May 14–17 | San Jose | Jensen Huang; Iain Couzins (Human Brains and Crowd Behavior), and Part Time Scientists Robert Boehme and Wes Faler (Space) | Kepler microarchitecture;[17] GeForce Grid (GeForce Now)[18] |
| 2013 | Mar 18–21 | San Jose | Jensen Huang; Erez Lieberman Aiden (genomics pioneer), Ralph V. Gilles (President and CEO of SRT Brand at Chrysler) | Face Works for facial animation[19] |
| 2014 | Mar 25 | San Jose | Jensen Huang; Dirk Van Gelder; Danny Nahmias, Adam Gazzaley; Oculus CEO Brandon (announced Facebook was acquiring) | NVLink;[20] Pascal microarchitecture;[21] Tegra mobile;[22] Audi drives itself onto stage |
| 2015 | Mar 17–20 | San Jose | Jensen Huang; Elon Musk; Jeff Dean; Andrew Ng; Andrej Karpathy (director of AI/Computer Vision at Tesla) | Nvidia Drive; Titan X;[23] Voice recognition[24] |
| 2016 | Apr 4–8; Sep 28–29 | San Jose; Amsterdam | Jensen Huang | Pascal microarchitecture new version;[25] DGX-1; Nvidia Drive PX2; iRay; DGX-2 |
| 2017 | May 8–11 | San Jose; Europe; Israel; Japan | Jensen Huang | Volta Supercomputer;[26] ISAAC Robot Simulator[27] |
| 2018 | Mar 26–29 | San Jose; Europe; Israel; Japan | Jensen Huang | Clara for healthcare and biomedical research;[28] ARM partnership announce for IoT;[29] RAPIDS Demo[30] |
| 2019 | Mar 17–21 | San Jose; Europe; Israel; Japan | Jensen Huang | GauGAN for animation;[31] Orin auto AI processor;[32] Self-driving car partnership with Toyota;[33] CUDA-X AI acceleration libraries adopted by PayPal, SAS, Walmart and Microsoft[34] |
| 2020 | Oct 5–9 | Digital[35] | Jensen Huang | AI Supercomputer for Biomedical Research;[36] Ampere GPUs for visual computing;[37] A100;[38] Artificial Intelligence for Edge and Cloud;[39] ISAAC Demo [40] |
| 2021 | Apr 12–16 | Digital | Jensen Huang; Geoffrey Hinton; Yann LeCun; Yoshua Bengio[41] | Grace;[42][43] BMW Virtual Factory;[44] Omniverse Enterprise;[45] SDK for quantum simulations;[46] DGX SuperPOD;[47] Nvidia BlueField 3 DPU[48] |
| 2022 | Mar 21–24 | Digital | Jensen Huang; Andrew Ng, Dale Durran, Doruk Sonmez | Hopper architecture,[49] H100 GPU,[50] Jetson AGX Orin[51] |
| 2022 | Sep 19–22 | Digital | Jensen Huang | TBA |
| 2023 | Mar 20–23 | Digital | Jensen Huang | TBA |
| 2024 | Mar 18–21 | San Jose | Jensen Huang | Blackwell architecture[52] |
| 2025[53] | Mar 17–21 | San Jose | Jensen Huang | NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1[54]
NVIDIA / General Motors Partnership[55] |
References
- ^ "GTC 2021: #1 AI Conference".
- ^ "NVIDIA Company History: Innovations over the Years".
- ^ "GTC 2021 Conference Workshops & Training".
- ^ a b Robertson, Barbara (October 5, 2009). "Technology Feast: Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference Serves Up Appetizing Possibilities". Computer Graphics World.
- ^ "Nvidia GPU Technology Conference Schedule" (PDF). Nvidia. Nvidia. September 25, 2009.
- ^ a b c d e Mickle, Tripp (March 18, 2025). "Nvidia Is Hosting the Super Bowl of A.I.". The New York Times.
- ^ "Jensen's Kitchen was a lie: Nvidia reveals GTC 2021 keynote nearly 100% fake". 12 August 2021.
- ^ a b c d e f Cosgrove, Emma (March 19, 2025). "Inside Nvidia's annual developer festival, where AI meets Denny's pancakes and Taiwan-style night markets". Business Insider.
- ^ a b Rosenbush, Steven; Bousquette, Isabelle (March 18, 2025). "Nvidia CEO Says AI Computing Needs to Surge 100-Fold". The Wall Street Journal.
- ^ Pizarro, Sal (March 18, 2025). "Nvidia GTC: Denny's gives techies a breakfast treat at keynote". The Mercury News.
- ^ "Nvidia's 'Fermi' GPU architecture revealed". 30 September 2009.
- ^ "Jen-Hsun Shows off NVIDIA GT300 'Fermi' Architecture".
- ^ "Nvidia Unveils New Models of Quadro Graphics Cards". 4 October 2010.
- ^ "World's Top Computational Scientists Coming to Beijing in December 2011 for NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference" (Press release). 30 August 2011.
- ^ "NVIDIA Releases CUDA 4.1: CUDA Goes LLVM and Open Source (Kind Of)".
- ^ "NVIDIA Opens up CUDA Compiler". 13 December 2011.
- ^ "Celebrating the GPU: Seven Take-Aways from Nvidia's GTC 2012". 21 May 2012.
- ^ "Nvidia announces GeForce Grid: Cloud gaming direct from a GPU, with games by Gaikai". 15 May 2012.
- ^ "Goodbye Uncanny Valley: NVIDIA's 'Face Works' Brings Shocking Realism to Facial Animation". Forbes.
- ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: GPU Technology Conference 2014: Opening, NVLink (part 1) GTC. YouTube.
- ^ "NVIDIA's next-generation GPU is called Pascal, and it's smaller, faster and more efficient". 25 March 2014.
- ^ "Nvidia updates GeForce graphics, Tegra mobile roadmaps". ZDNet.
- ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Opening Keynote at GTC 2015: Leaps in Visual Computing. YouTube.
- ^ "NVIDIA GTC: The Race to Perfect Voice Recognition Using GPUs". Forbes.
- ^ "NVIDIA Unleashes Monster Pascal GPU Card at GTC16". 6 April 2016.
- ^ "Nvidia's monstrous Volta GPU appears, packed with 21 billion transistors and 5,120 cores".
- ^ "GTC 2017 Keynote".
- ^ "Nvidia Clara: World's fastest AI Inferences via GPU-based Architecture". 18 September 2018.
- ^ "NVIDIA Partners with Arm to Bring Artificial Intelligence to Billions of Internet of Things Devices". April 2018.
- ^ "GTC Europe 2018 Keynote - Part 1".
- ^ "Stroke of Genius: NVIDIA Researchers Debut GauGAN at GTC 2019".
- ^ "Nvidia Announces New Orin Auto AI Processor". Forbes.
- ^ "NVIDIA Expands Driverless Vehicle Partnership with Toyota". 26 March 2019.
- ^ "At GTC: Nvidia Expands Scope of Its AI and Datacenter Ecosystem". 20 March 2019.
- ^ "NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference goes online in October". 17 August 2020.
- ^ "Nvidia Opens GTC with Plans for AI Supercomputer for Biomedical Research". 5 October 2020.
- ^ "Nvidia intros new Ampere GPUs for visual computing". ZDNet.
- ^ "Nvidia's 5 Biggest GTC 2020 Announcements: From A100 to SmartNICs". 14 May 2020.
- ^ "Nvidia Asserts Itself as the AI Leader from the Edge to the Cloud". Forbes.
- ^ "GPU Technology Conference 2019 Keynote".
- ^ "Nvidia GPU Technology Conference Brings Out the AI All Stars". Forbes.
- ^ "Nvidia unveils Grace ARM-based CPU for giant-scale AI and HPC apps". 12 April 2021.
- ^ "Nvidia flexes some enterprise muscle at GTC 2021 conference". 20 April 2021.
- ^ Knight, Will. "BMW's Virtual Factory Uses AI to Hone the Assembly Line". Wired.
- ^ "Everything announced at Nvidia's GTC 2021: A data center CPU, SDK for quantum simulations and more". ZDNet.
- ^ "Everything announced at Nvidia's GTC 2021: A data center CPU, SDK for quantum simulations and more". ZDNet.
- ^ "Nvidia dips its toes into IaaS with subscriptions for DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputers".
- ^ "Nvidia unveils BlueField 3 DPU. It's much faster". 12 April 2021.
- ^ "NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Keynote at GTC 2022". NVIDIA. Retrieved 2022-04-30.
- ^ "NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Keynote at GTC 2022". NVIDIA. Retrieved 2022-04-30.
- ^ "NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Keynote at GTC 2022". NVIDIA. Retrieved 2022-04-30.
- ^ Ray, Tiernan (March 19, 2024). "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveils next-gen 'Blackwell' chip family at GTC". ZDNET.
- ^ "GTC25 Terms and Conditions" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2025-03-17. Retrieved 17 March 2025.
- ^ "NVIDIA Announces Isaac GR00T N1 — the World's First Open Humanoid Robot Foundation Model — and Simulation Frameworks to Speed Robot Development". NVIDIA Newsroom. Retrieved 2025-03-20.
- ^ "General Motors and NVIDIA Collaborate on AI for Next-Generation Vehicle Experience and Manufacturing". NVIDIA Newsroom. Retrieved 2025-03-25.