Nvidia Brings GTC to Washington D.C. for First Time, Emphasizing AI Leadership and Government Partnerships

Nvidia's D.C. moment

Driving the news: Axios got a sneak peek at themes of Huang's keynote tomorrow. "AI is the most transformative technology in human history -- and the race is on," Huang says. * "GTC D.C. brings together researchers, developers, business leaders and policymakers in the heart of our nation's capital to explore breakthroughs in AI, robotics, life sciences, energy, quantum, and 6G -- advancing innovations vital to America's technological leadership." The conference will be held today through Wednesday at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, with live demos and 70+ sessions on chip design, superintelligence, quantum computing and more. * In conjunction with the conference, Huang and Eric Schmidt, chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), will announce a Task Force on AI and the Future of Work, including representatives from industry, academia and government. * The task force will be established in early 2026, deliver an interim report at SCSP's AI Expo in May, and a final report in October 2026. What they're saying: Nvidia Vice President of External Affairs Ned Finkle said that to "strengthen America's global leadership in AI, we must invest in our people." * SCSP CEO Ylli Bajraktari said: "AI is remaking the economy, and this task force is about equipping every American to participate fully in that new era." The bottom line: The impact of AI on the workforce is top-of-mind for politicians in Washington, whose constituents worry about job displacement. * At a conference that's largely about advancements in computing, questions about how people and their livelihoods could be impacted will loom large. Sign up for Axios AI+ Government, our new Friday newsletter focusing on how governments encourage, regulate and use AI.

Nvidia GTC: What to expect as the AI roadshow comes to D.C.

At Nvidia's first-ever Washington GTC, the dress code will skew fewer hoodies, more Hill badges. With more than 70 sessions on "responsible AI," quantum computing, digital infrastructure, and beyond, the company is staging the quiet sequel to Silicon Valley's biggest export: persuasion. The company's annual GPU Technology Conference has long been a Silicon Valley ritual -- a glossy pageant of chips, demos, and developer swagger. CEO Jensen Huang's leather jacket has become as recognizable as his chip diagrams, and every March, he fills arenas in San Jose, California, with developers eager to see what's next. But this week's three-day summit (Oct. 27-29) at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center swaps out the coders for contractors. The shift to Washington will likely say as much about the company's ambitions as much as its timing. AI infrastructure is quickly becoming a matter of statecraft -- the kind of national-interest project that invites regulation, subsidies, and oversight in equal measure. (There's a labeled Government Affairs track on the agenda.) As federal AI guidance continues to take shape, Nvidia is positioning itself as the vendor that can make Washington's digital dreams real without rewriting its bureaucracy. Nvidia is courting a market that buys at scale and rarely switches vendors. Monday was the conference's quieter on-ramp -- think check-ins, workshops, and campus activations -- but it sets the tone for an event built for buyers as much as builders. The show really kicks off Tuesday, with Huang's keynote address; he'll take to the main stage at 12 p.m. ET, with an expanded pregame beforehand -- and a livestream for anyone who isn't within badge-scanning range. Huang's keynote is expected to double as a civics lesson: a reminder that in an age of tariffs, export bans, and trillion-dollar compute budgets, AI supremacy is as much about influence as innovation. The Nvidia CEO is likely to emphasize power efficiency, secure supply chains, and "AI factories" -- talking points that translate easily into Washington shorthand for jobs, infrastructure, and national competitiveness. Expect nods to "agentic" or "physical" AI and to quantum/HPC -- the themes Nvidia is spotlighting for Washington -- and expect them framed in the language of deployment rather than demos. Expectations are calibrated toward execution: reiterating the spring roadmap (Blackwell Ultra now, Rubin/Vera Rubin on the horizon) and translating it for a Washington audience that cares about supply, reliability, and the total cost of inference almost as much as raw TOPS. If March's GTC was about unveiling, October will likely be about deployment -- how to get these systems into data centers with megawatt budgets and agencies with RFP checklists. Investors will listen for near-term signals on networking and power constraints, public-sector demand, and any color on delivery timing. And if Huang's keynote threads the needle -- performance per watt, time-to-value, and a story about connecting millions of accelerators without melting the substation -- the week will have done its job. Nvidia's "Connect with the Experts" stations -- drop-in consults on accelerated computing, agentic AI, CUDA tuning, vision stacks, Omniverse twins, and even quantum via CUDA-Q -- are a triage desk for teams trying to harden a pilot into a program. Certifications are running on-site, too, including new generative-AI credentials, slotted to make "we have certified staff" a slide you can show your contracting officer. Nvidia is preaching stability, resilience, and domestic sourcing. Federal customers want less about what's possible and more about what's allowed. The same photonics, interconnects, and inference optimizations that wow investors in San Jose will likely be framed as power-management and energy-security solutions. Set against that pitch are the usual Washington cautions -- vendor lock-in, export-control exposure, and simple energy availability -- which are likely to surface in Q&As and side-room briefings. Startups get their moment once the keynote glow fades. Nvidia's Inception program is staging a startup pavilion on the floor and a Wednesday morning pitch hour where founders have five minutes each to win over investors, integrators, and the odd colonel who wandered in from a JADC2 meeting. This is the "receipts" part of the story: edge robotics, security, synthetic data, and healthcare triage -- the applied demos that show what a federal checkbook might actually buy. Nvidia is betting that the agencies walking out of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center will see AI as an asset to commission, not as a risk to manage. This version of GTC is about showing that the next wave of innovation will need as many signatures as it does transistors -- and that Nvidia already speaks both languages. The near-term tells will be prosaic: who books follow-ups, which pilots get named, and whether any agencies telegraph budget intent coming out of the show. If San Jose is the birthplace of hype, Washington is its proving ground. This is where Nvidia will work to show that its machines can coexist with the bureaucracy they're meant to modernize -- that AI can fit inside the rulebook without losing its edge. Whether anyone in the federal government actually buys that argument might not matter right away. In Washington, ideas tend to take hold long before the contracts do. By the time the lights go down on Wednesday, the takeaway won't be about what Nvidia revealed, but whom it impressed. The company that turned chips into symbols of ambition is now trying to turn them into policy. And in Washington, that might be the most powerful upgrade of all.

NVIDIA GTC Washington DC - $4.9 trillion giant bets the future on Nokia, Palantir and "American Intelligence" as Europe 'whines and cries'

The most valuable company in the world, NVIDIA - market cap $4.9 trillion - has set out an AI-powered vision based on partnerships with Nokia and Palantir, plus "AI factories", American jobs, robotics, digital twins, 6G, quantum technology, and robotaxis. In a 90-minute speech at NVIDIA GTC Washington DC, founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang described the 'Palantir Ontology' - a semantic representation of an organization's digitized assets - as "the single most important enterprise stack in the world". In a separate interview at the event, he added: Palantir is the most technically deep enterprise platform company in the world. [...] This collaboration is going to supercharge them. Suggesting that 'AI' stands for "American Intelligence", Palantir CEO Alex Karp said: AI makes America the dominant country in the world. I spent half my life in Europe - they're whining and crying. We have the right chips, software, engineers, culture. [...] The whole thing is combining into a juggernaut. Words hardly designed to appeal to European buyers of the analytics company's services, and certainly aimed at China, which is automating faster than any nation on Earth. But despite European 'whining', the key partnership announced at GTC Washington DC - and its most surprising - was a $1 billion investment in Finnish telecoms infrastructure provider Nokia to usher in 6G and AI-native mobility - NVIDIA hailed it the "AI-native wireless era" - and a form of intelligent edge cloud for industry. Huang introduced the NVIDIA Arc Aerial RAN (Radio Access Network) computer, a 6G-ready telecommunications computing platform, with Nokia expanding its global portfolio with new AI-RAN products based on the platform. Dell PowerEdge servers are also part of the mix. Telecommunications is a critical national infrastructure: the digital nervous system of our economy and security. Built on NVIDIA CUDA and AI, AI-RAN will revolutionize telecommunications, a generational platform shift that empowers the United States to regain global leadership in this vital infrastructure technology. Together with Nokia and America's telecom ecosystem, we're igniting this revolution, equipping operators to build intelligent, adaptive networks that will define the next generation of global connectivity. This theme of America seizing back global leadership, in every sense - technological, political, and industrial - was a puzzling element of Huang's speech, given that the US has long been the world's most successful economy, with eight of the world's top 10 most valuable companies being US tech providers, and 17 of the top 20 being American firms, and 23 of the top 30. A realm of imagined slights, it seems. Huang's keynote began with a video likening AI to America's big national projects of old, such as the Space Race. It (wrongly) suggested that every significant technology advancement of the modern era has come out of the US - the video namechecked the Web, for example, which history credits to Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Onstage, Huang - trademark leather jacket perhaps hiding the million-dollar Richard Mille watch - then acknowledged the political significance of hosting the event in the US capital. He hailed NVIDIA's critical partnership with the federal government, though (understandably) neglected to mention its $1 billion supercomputer partnership with chip rival AMD, or its $8.9 billion investment in Intel, which gives it 10% ownership of the client/server era giant. Make no mistake, the decision to host this event - and its future iterations - in DC was a quiet reminder of NVIDIA's power as much as a statement of America's ambitions for AI. Just as the government's other chip partnerships are designed to move national eggs into multiple baskets rather than be reliant on NVIDIA's packed order books and scarcity pricing. Pricing was clearly on Huang's mind when he claimed that the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell - a combination of its Grace CPU and Blackwell GPU products - offered the lowest price per token operating cost of any comparable AI-centric hardware. Then announcing a robotaxi partnership with Uber based on NVIDIA's DRIVE Hyperion autonomous driving platform, Huang described robotaxis as cars with an "AI chauffeur".He explained: The inflection point is about to get here. In the future, in the trillion miles a year that are driven, the 100 million cars made each year, there's 50 million taxis around the world. And that's going to be augmented by a whole bunch of robotaxis. It's going to be a very large market. To connect it and deploy it around the world, today we're announcing a partnership with Uber [...]. We're working together to connect these NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion cars into a global network. In the future, you'll be able to hail one of these cars and the ecosystem is going to be incredibly rich. We'll have Hyperion or robotaxi cars all over the world. This is going to be a new computing platform for us and I'm expecting it to be quite successful. He added that the intention is that "every car company in the world" can build vehicles that are "robotaxi ready". DRIVE Hyperion already has the support of several automotive companies, including Mercedes Benz and Netherlands-based Stellantis, which owns the Peugeot, Citroen, and Opel marques, among others. But the real inflection point for the planet is AI, he said. At the core of this are two platform transitions from general-purpose computing to accelerated computing. NVIDIA CUDA and the suite of libraries called CUDA X has enabled us to address practically every industry. And we're at the inflection point - it is now growing as "a virtual cycle", apparently. (He meant virtuous circle, though some commentators see the circular AI economy of vendor selling to vendor as a virtual market - in the pejorative sense._ Huang continued: The second inflection point is now upon us: the second platform transition from classical handwritten software to Artificial Intelligence. Two platform transitions happening at the same time, which is the reason why we're feeling such incredible growth. Indeed, 2025 FY revenue - 2024 in calendar terms, reported in February this year - was up 114% at $130.5 billion. Huang's 90-minute keynote also embraced quantum computing, suggesting that the future lies in using silicon to model and interpret the results of logical qubits in a 'best of both worlds' partnership. NVIDIA's NVQLink links quantum processors with classical AI hardware. He also talked up a relationship with CrowdStrike on cybersecurity, saying that security needs to move at GPU speed to combat the "bad AIs" of cyber-criminals. The polite passive aggression which is as much a Huang trademark as the leather jacket and oft-quoted claim he doesn't wear a watch so he can focus on the present (chortle) was much in evidence during the keynote. Despite talking in depth about AI, robotics, humanoid machines, autonomous vehicles, and robotaxis, Huang's only mention of Elon Musk was to say, "My friend Elon is also working on something", as images of the Figure 01 humanoid - and even bipedal Disney Research robot Blue - appeared onscreen. Ouch! In the robotics space, which Huang said will be "one of the largest consumer electronics and industrial manufacturing sectors" and will cover labour shortages, NVIDIA partners with Figure, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Field AI, Sanctuary AI, Skild AI, Humanoid, and China's Unitree, among others. But factories were at the heart of Huang's speech - both "AI factories" (enhanced data centers and NVIDIA's clusters of GPUs) and physical facilities, with labour repatriated - in theory, at least - to America: That's the future of manufacturing, the future of factories. I want to thank our partner Foxconn - Young Liu, the CEO is here. But all these ecosystem partners make it possible for us to create the future of robotic factories. The factory is essentially a robot that's orchestrating robots to build things that are robotic. You know, the amount of software necessary to do this is so intense that unless you could do it inside a digital twin - to plan it, to design it, to operate it inside a digital twin - the hope of getting this to work is nearly impossible. A speech of bold announcements and political intent run through with a hefty dose of MAGA exceptionalism. Closing his keynote, Huang said: Thank you, thank you, for allowing us to bring GTC to Washington DC. We're going to do it hopefully every year. And thank you all for your service and for making America great again. But how much of what he announced was - really - American? The revenues and stock price, perhaps. In the real world, NVIDIA's business is, to a very large extent, reliant on others to make it happen. The presence of Foxconn and other non-US industrial partners, including a 'whining' European powerhouse, loomed large in both the keynote and its accompanying videos. Yes, Foxconn has invested in building US facilities in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas, and is a critical partner in NVIDIA's AI hardware and software ambitions. But it is a Taiwanese company, whose biggest factory is in Shenzhen, China, where it employs 230,000 people.

What Really Happened Inside NVIDIA's GTC DC 2025 | AIM

"The Age of AI has begun. Blackwell is its engine. Made in America, made for the world." NVIDIA's GTC DC 2025 showcased the company's expanding influence across every layer of the AI ecosystem, from chips and data centres to networking and quantum computing. The event in Washington, D.C. highlighted how NVIDIA is positioning itself at the centre of the world's AI infrastructure buildout, forging partnerships that span government, industry, and scientific research. "We couldn't do what we do without NVIDIA's ecosystem of partners," CEO Jensen Huang said, nodding to GTC's reputation as "the Super Bowl of AI." That momentum is also reflected in the company's market performance. NVIDIA's market capitalisation is approaching $5 trillion, with the company's stock reaching an all-time high during October 2025. Specifically, as of the most recent

NVIDIA's GTC Comes to Washington for the First Time, As CEO Jensen Huang Is Expected to Champion America's AI Leadership

NVIDIA's GTC 2025 has kicked off today, marking the first time Team Green is holding the event in Washington, as it is directed towards America's leadership in the AI segment. Well, it seems like NVIDIA has expanded its GTC event this year by holding it twice in 2025, and the last time we saw Jensen appear at this particular event was back in March, when we saw the unveiling of the GB300 'Blackwell Ultra' AI servers, as well as the future AI roadmap. However, this time, GTC is returning in October, and surprisingly, the venue is set for Washington, which in itself is quite a significant move from NVIDIA. The event will take place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, with Jensen's keynote scheduled for October 28th. The event officially begins today, with workshops taking place throughout the venue. Well, since this GTC is a relatively new venture by NVIDIA, details about what we could see happening are uncertain for now. However, at a dedicated blog page, NVIDIA claims that CEO Jensen Huang will unveil information around "how AI will reshape industries, infrastructure, and the public sector" in the form of a roadmap, so it's likely that we'll see various computing architectures being discussed. Hence, Jensen will discuss the Blackwell Ultra production ramp-up and the next-gen Rubin AI lineup, which will be the highlight. Factoring in geopolitical concerns has become crucial for NVIDIA, which is why GTC Washington is an event that will be more focused on the efforts Team Green is making to ensure the US stays ahead in the AI race. The event will feature several key individuals in the AI supply chain, such as Foxconn's Young Liu. NVIDIA labels the event as "See What's Next in AI," so announcements around AI and industries are likely to be a common topic discussed by Jensen as well. Jensen's keynote will take place at 12:00 p.m. ET tomorrow, and this will be one of the most critical highlights of NVIDIA's AI journey in 2025; hence, make sure to stay tuned.