Nvidia’s big show hits its marks but plays to tough crowd

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Nvidia is doing just fine. Lately, it has seemed harder to convince the world of that simple truth.

The world, to be sure, has changed a lot over the past year since Nvidia hosted its previous GTC conference. Political and economic instability both domestically and globally have made investors edgy and damped the appetite for riskier tech stocks in particular. The Nasdaq Composite was down nearly 8% for the year to date ahead of Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s Tuesday GTC keynote address, having more than doubled in 2024.

The company’s stock slid again by more than 3% Tuesday, as Huang’s keynote came during another broad market selloff. The stock clawed back some of that ground on Wednesday, but Nvidia is still down 12.5% for the year compared with a blistering 81% gain at this point last year. The five other megacap tech giants commanding market caps above $1 trillion have averaged a 9% drop so far this year.

For its own business, Nvidia has also had to contend with worries about increased competition and developments such as China’s DeepSeek, which has made claims that seem to undercut the need to spend billions on Nvidia’s GPU chips to produce advanced AI models and tools. Huang answered both at this year’s GTC, spending a good portion of his keynote address demonstrating that the sort of AI reasoning popularized by DeepSeek actually requires more powerful computing capabilities. “The understanding of R-1 was completely wrong," he told financial analysts on Wednesday, speaking of the open-source large language model that DeepSeek developed.