Inside Nvidia GTC, where cutting-edge AI means robots, Taiwan-style night markets, and Denny's pancakes

• Nvidia's GTC conference in San Jose, California, featured CEO Jensen Huang's keynote on AI advances.
• Huang's speech highlighted Nvidia's new AI partnerships, software tools, and chip architectures.
• With crowded sessions and a bustling exhibition floor, Nvidia's immense growth was on display.

The party started as so many do — with pancakes in a parking lot.

I attended Nvidia's GTC conference, which has taken over downtown San Jose, California, this week. Tuesday was the biggest day for the AI juggernaut. At 10 a.m. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his keynote address, which lasted more than two and a half hours.

But first, breakfast.

The legendary Denny's breakfast

It was a chilly early morning in San Jose. The "pregame" started at 6:30 a.m. with breakfast from Denny's, the restaurant where Huang came up with the idea for Nvidia. I needed to know who would show up more than three hours early for a speech about computer chips.

When I arrived just before 7 a.m., the line was already substantial. A massive red mobile Denny's kitchen was cooking up "Nvidia bytes" — essentially sausages and pancakes. Diners were encouraged to wrap up their bytes like a taco and add syrup on top, like Huang does.

I chatted with some of the early birds. Some were die-hard Nvidia fans. Some were jet-lagged, having flown in the day before from London or Toronto, so they were up anyway. Some wanted to get into the SAP Center as soon as the stadium doors opened to avoid the massive lines that would form the hour before the speech. Some heard a rumor that Huang himself might stop by the tailgate.

And sure enough, by 7:25 a.m., muscled men in suits with earpieces started multiplying. With no fanfare, Huang walked out from behind the registration tent wearing his signature uniform, all black and a leather moto jacket. The bleary-eyed crowds sprung into action — phones up for photos.

Huang donned an apron and went inside the food truck to make some pancakes, as he had as a 15-year-old Denny's employee.

"At this pace, I'd run the company out of business. I used to be a lot faster," he said of his chef skills after emerging from the kitchen and immediately meeting CNBC reporter Kristina Partsinevelos and a camera crew.

Partsinevelos tried to ground the conversation, but Huang was all jokes.

"You're talking about the stock? I'm talking about Denny's!" he said.

By 8:15 a.m., Huang disappeared into the SAP Center, where he turned up on the pre-show panel airing live inside the stadium.

As I reached my floor seat, the panel was giving a reverent retrospective of the company — including its many brushes with failure before AI changed everything.

Huang 'without a net'

Leading up to the speech, Nvidia's partner companies were eager to find out if they would garner a mention on one of tech's brightest stages. One Nvidia employee told me that up to the last minute, a local war room of Nvidia employees was tweaking the company's dozens of announcements.

Once the speech starts, it was all in Huang's hands.

He kicked off by firing T-shirts into the crowd from an Nvidia-green T-shirt cannon.

"I just want you to know that I'm up here without a net. There are no scripts, there's no teleprompter, and I've got a lot of things to cover. So let's get started," Huang said.

The 62-year-old CEO proceeded to blow through his scheduled two hours.

He focused on Nvidia's advancements, a flurry of new partnerships and software tools for AI developers, and coming chip architectures that could underpin the computation speed and efficiency that creates new industries. These are already creating what Huang calls "AI Factories."

He also spoke on the challenges of realizing the AI-enabled future he has promised for years. He addressed shortages of fresh data to feed AI models, limitations in the ever-important training phase, and energy constraints.

The world of computing has reached a "tipping point," and the "platform shift" to accelerated computing is well underway, he said.

The crowd stayed rapt, although a little antsy at the two-hour mark. But the final video clip reenergized the room. A Disney-designed robot named Blue, which looked like part of the Star Wars universe, toddled through a desert and then ascended — for real — from below the stage.

Then the crowd jumped to their feet and raised their phones.

"Have a great GTC! Thank you! Hey, Blue, let's go home. Good job," said Jensen.

'We're going to have to grow San Jose'

After the speech, thousands of attendees streamed into the downtown San Jose streets. The SAP Center, which had only a few empty seats, holds 17,500, and 25,000 people were expected at this year's event.

The crowds made their way back to Plaza de Cesar Chavez, temporarily renamed GTC Park, to find lunch at the procession of food trucks on-site daily. Attendees again had to wait in long lines.

The lunch lines were just one of many signs that GTC has outgrown its traditional home. Lines to get into the San Jose Convention Center's conference sessions snaked through the hallways.

Nvidia still calls GTC a developer conference, though the evolution from technical developer confab to serious dealmaking destination was on display at a swanky building next to the convention center dedicated only to business meetings. The elevators couldn't handle the volume of people constantly coming in and out.

Even Nvidia team members arriving just behind me balked and abandoned ship to relocate when they saw the lines. Getting from the sidewalk to the meeting room inside the building took 35 minutes.

"The only way to hold more people at GTC is we're going to have to grow San Jose, and we're working on it," said Huang during the keynote.

Nvidia's robotic future

Logistics aside, I soon met with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who detailed the many ways Nvidia's accelerated computing is changing how doctors and hospitals work.

She said it could be decades before robots can actually perform surgeries without human assistance. But companies like Moon Surgical are already creating surgical assistance robots to hold cameras and tools with arms that never tire. Nvidia also works with da Vinci robots, which can suture wounds, among other tasks.

I then headed back to the convention center to walk the exhibition floor during happy hour, where I saw some of the technology Powell championed on display. Because Nvidia's impact spans many industries, the floor showcased cars, vacuuming robots, simulated human bodies ready for surgery, and all the biggest names in cloud computing.

I also passed the Nvidia gear store, which was booming. A worker there told me the 2025 GTC T-shirt and puffer vests were the biggest sellers.

My 12-hour Tuesday at the conference ended at the GTC Night Market back in the park. The setup was an homage to Huang's love of Taiwan's night markets, with live music, drinks, local food like bao buns, yakitori, cupcakes, and a punnily-named "juice" bar sponsored by GPU cloud provider Coreweave.

If Nvidia has its way, AI is going to continue to do a lot of hard work for us going forward. But 12 hour-days are here to stay, at least for a while. On my way back to my hotel — via San Jose bike share past a now-silent SAP Center — I thought of these two I had spotted inside the convention center:

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