Nvidia’s A.I. ‘Super Bowl’ Is an Economic Boon for San Jose
During the early days of Nvidia’s annual developer conference, the San Jose, Calif., event was more akin to a science fair. In 2024, the increasingly popular gathering was dubbed the “Woodstock of A.I.” This year, with a record-breaking 28,000 attendees, GTC 2025 was upgraded to the new technology’s “Super Bowl.”
In recent years, the Jensen Huang-helmed chipmaker has become the undisputed darling of the A.I. world, with demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) boosting its market cap to a staggering $2.93 trillion. But nowhere else is Nvidia’s soaring success more evident than in San Jose’s downtown district, where Nvidia’s GTC conference has become so popular that Huang had to deliver his annual keynote address from a jam-packed hockey arena this year.
Compared to GTC 2024, Nvidia’s newest iteration of its developer conference “literally almost doubled in size,” Alex Stettinski, CEO of the San Jose Downtown Association, told Observer. Foot traffic at the San Jose Convention Center, which serves as GTC’s primary venue, rose from around 19,000 last year to roughly 26,000, according to Stettinski, who noted that event correlated to some 13,000 downtown dining visits—a more than 130 percent increase year-over-year. It’s too early to gauge the total economic impact that the conference, which was held between March 17 and 2021, had on San Jose this year. However, given the increase in attendees and restaurant activity, it will surpass last year’s figure of $15.5 million, representing the city’s largest conference since the Covid-19 pandemic. “I would say, anecdotally, that the number probably is substantially higher,” said Stettinski.
Around 1,500 attendees came to Nvidia’s first-ever GTC conference in 2009, which took place in the poster-lined hallways of San Jose’s Fairmont Hotel and served as a gathering for engineers and scientists eager to discuss the world of GPUs. Nowadays, however, GTC has become one of the tech world’s most closely-watched events, one scrutinized by analysts and attended by industry leaders like Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of DreamWorks; Michael Dell (DELL), CEO of Dell; and Yann LeCun, Meta (META)’s chief A.I. scientist.
T-shirt cannons and night markets
It’s also an increasingly incorporated spectacle. During Huang’s keynote on March 18, the chief executive didn’t just discuss his company’s upcoming A.I. chips—he also fired Nvidia merch into the crowd with the help of T-shirt cannons. Attendees wandering San Jose’s downtown, which was awash in Nvidia’s signature colors of green and black, were also treated to a litany of activations that included a Taiwanese-style night market complete with 20 vendors. To accommodate its growing size, Nvidia GTC expanded from two downtown locations to seven this year, said Stettinski, with the chipmaker temporarily taking over areas such as Cesar Chavez Park or the Tech Interactive museum.
In some ways, GTC 2025 was a rehearsal for San Jose’s ability to handle major upcoming events like the 2026 Super Bowl and World Cup. “It was a little bit of a test run to see what we can do,” said Stettinski, who noted that the response from locals has been largely positive. “The only complaint that I heard once in a while is, ‘Man, I can’t get a dinner table.'”
Whether or not Nvidia’s GTC will become too big for San Jose remains to be seen. While the chipmaker hasn’t yet confirmed that the event will return to the Northern California hub next year, Stettinski said the city “will do anything we can” to bring Nvidia back in 2026. Huang, for his part, seems set on staying put. “The only way to hold more people at GTC is we’re going to have to grow San Jose,” remarked the executive during his keynote. “And we’re working on it.”