AI Applications Take Center Stage at GTC 2025: A New Dawn for NVIDIA Investors?

TradingKey - NVIDIA, the technology giant, has had a rocky start this year, grappling with concerns over the rise of DeepSeek and escalating tensions in U.S.-China trade relations. Year to date, NVDA's stock has declined by 10.5%.

The company is set to host its annual GTC from March 17 to 21, 2025. 

Applications of AI have been sources of criticism from investors. However, this year's GTC is expected to take a broader perspective, focusing on long-term themes and opportunities in fields such as robotics, AI software, autonomous driving, climate research, and drug discovery. 

Here are the key highlights to watch for at this year’s conference:

Latest Chip Developments of Key Interest to Investors

CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote address at the SAP Center on Tuesday at 10 AM Pacific Time, focusing on AI and accelerated computing technologies. 

In the latest earnings call, Huang confirmed that the upcoming Blackwell B300 series (codenamed Blackwell Ultra) will launch in the second half of this year. Semi Analysis predicts that the B300, built on TSMC’s 4nm process, will deliver approximately 50% more computing power than the B200. 

Moreover, the Blackwell Ultra will feature increased memory (288GB), which will be highly attractive for clients looking to run and train memory-intensive AI models. 

Furthermore, the upgraded products will also utilize advanced cooling methods: due to higher power consumption and heat dissipation needs, Nvidia will move away from traditional air cooling solutions and fully adopt liquid cooling technology. This shift will not only significantly increase the use of liquid cooling plates and quick connectors but also signify the arrival of a “secondary cooling revolution.” 

Perhaps the most exciting prospect for investors is Nvidia’s next-generation GPU series, Vera Rubin, named after a prominent female scientist. Nvidia's practice of naming chips after women and minority scientists is one of the tech industry's most notable efforts to promote diversity. Set to debut in 2026, Rubin promises a “huge leap” in computing power, potentially incorporating 12 HBM4E memory stacks, a significant increase from the eight stacks used in previous generations, which could yield a total memory of up to 576GB. 

Other key topics may include post-training and testing time extensions and the expansion of Nvidia NVLink, continuing from the launch of its fifth-generation products last year.

Will China AI Day Capture Attention Again?

This year’s GTC 2025 will also feature a China AI Day — an online event focusing on cloud and internet advancements, scheduled to begin streaming at 6:30 PM Pacific Time on March 17. 

This event will bring together several Chinese cloud and internet companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Ant Group, and JD.com. 

They will share cutting-edge advancements in large language models, multimodal large language models, data science, and search promotion, showcasing how collaborative optimization of hardware and software can enhance the performance and efficiency of production-level AI.

First-Ever Quantum Day

NVIDIA will announce its inaugural “Quantum Day” on Thursday, March 20, at GTC 2025, celebrating and exploring significant advancements in quantum computing. Jensen Huang will share the stage with executives from industry leaders, including Rigetti, Quantinuum, and D-Wave. 

As Rob Siegel, a Stanford lecturer and investor, stated, "Nobody is shipping quantum computers in volume, on any kind of scale in the next five to seven years. But that doesn’t mean the technology isn’t important."

Humanoid Robotics and Autonomous Driving Session

A "Humanoid Robotics" session will be held on the 19th, focusing on discussions in robotics and autonomous driving. Nvidia's star researcher Jim Pan and leading humanoid robotics companies will participate. 

RJ Scaringe, CEO of the leading American electric vehicle company Rivian, will be a guest speaker. Rivian uses Nvidia’s autonomous driving platform, Drive Orrin, and is expected to discuss how Nvidia’s technology is helping Rivian.

Waymo, currently at the forefront of autonomous robotic taxi services, will also be in attendance. Research lead Dragomir Angelov is expected to explain Waymo’s technologies.

NVIDIA's New Developments in Healthcare

Earlier this year, NVIDIA announced partnerships with healthcare leaders IQVIA, Illumina, Mayo Clinic, and the Arc Institute to integrate AI, accelerated computing, and biological data, aiming to position healthcare as a major technology sector.

Illumina is collaborating with NVIDIA to advance next-generation genomics for drug discovery and human health. They plan to enhance the genomics market by developing multi-omics data analysis on the Illumina Connected Analytics platform, facilitating breakthroughs in target identification, clinical development, and biomarker discovery.

Mayo Clinic will implement the new NVIDIA DGX™ Blackwell system, leveraging the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture with 1.4TB of GPU memory to process digital pathology whole slide datasets. This effort, in conjunction with NVIDIA’s medical imaging platform MONAI, aims to enhance personalized healthcare and improve predictive treatment strategies.

The upcoming GTC may provide further insights into these developments.

How Will Investors Process New Developments?

According to Wells Fargo analysts, historical performance indicates that NVDA stock has averaged a 7% outperformance relative to the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index during the week of GTC and the following two weeks, with average returns of 6.4% and 4.5%, respectively. Whether this strong historical performance can be replicated amid challenges for tech stocks remains to be seen.

Ben Reitzes, managing director at Melius Research, believes that the risks facing Nvidia have largely been absorbed by the market and that the company's valuation is disconnected from its long-term growth potential. In this context, the GTC conference may allow the market to reacquaint itself with the company’s value: "We remain very optimistic."