In recent months, the financial performance of Nvidia Corp. stock has put the industry on notice. The company has been making big moves, and it’s no surprise that more than 16,000 people wanted to see what’s next at this year’s Nvidia GTC, which ran from March 18 to 21.

The jam-packed event featured a keynote from CEO Jensen Huang, who declared the event the “conference for the era of AI.” It’s an amazing time in the tech industry, but the event delivered in terms of setting the tone for where artificial intelligence systems are going, according to theCUBE Research executive analyst John Furrier (pictured, right).

“The financial performance on the business fundamentals, has everybody in the industry on notice,” Furrier said on a recent episode of the CUBE podcast. “It’s mind-blowing performance; it’s technology shift that’s categorically new. And the CEO, Jensen Huang, saying this is a new category of how things are going to get done.”

Analysts for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with industry professionals about what comes next during the event. They explored Nvidia’s development of the Blackwell GPU architecture and delved into the company’s vision for a new generative AI era.

Here are three key insights you may have missed from the Nvidia GTC 24 event:

1. Nvidia is reshaping the industry with AI-driven innovation.

While GTC may have started as a developer conference, this year’s event made it clear that it had evolved into the industry AI trade show. The nuance that people may miss, however, is that the event really is all things accelerated computing, according to theCUBE guest analyst Zeus Kerravala (right).

“AI is just another form of accelerated computing. So is the high-performance graphics, so is robotics, computer vision, all those things. It’s all wrapped up in AI,” he said. “But nobody does accelerated computing better than Nvidia.”

Among the highlights of the event were the company’s unveiling of its all-new Blackwell GPU architecture and the announcement of NVLink Switch. The technology is blurring the lines between chips and systems and creating a neural network system that resembles a data center in a box.

AI systems are going to come fast, according to Furrier. It’s something he calls clustered systems.

“This all started, in my opinion, with AWS when AWS created that hyperscale performance. Google Azure followed, Oracle’s now trying to follow,” Furrier said. “The idea of James Hamilton, when you put together those data centers, they really innovate on the network.”

When one looks at what’s going on in these engineered clustered systems and the connection points between GPUs, NVLink Switch makes it happen, Furrier explained. With GPUs talking to each other, this is now a new system.

“I think you’re starting to see the evolution of not just the GPU, but everything around GPUs, plural. Now, GPU racks plural. It’s an AI factory, they call it,” Furrier said. “I call it cluster system supercloud. Whatever you want to call it, this is change. This is a different market.”

The company is playing in every part of the market with AI everywhere, according to theCUBE Research chief analyst Dave Vellante (left). The event revealed that generative AI has emerged as the new seed of innovation.

“My takeaway from listening to it yesterday and today, [Huang is] basically saying the same infrastructure is going to do both training and inference. Now, there’s definitely a market,” Vellante said. “He talked about chiplets a little bit … because people have been trying to de-position Nvidia’s monolithic approach. But there’s real benefits to monolithic, and he talked about that.”

Huang noted that every part talks to the memory, and every part talks to each other and that the company had to create a new communication system to be able to do that. Nvidia is taking the high end of the market, according to Vellante.

“There’s really nobody that, in my opinion, is going to touch them. Plus, they’re also doing chiplet stuff with MediaTek,” Vellante said. “The other thing that I wanted to mention is yesterday we heard about Ansys, Synopsys, Cadence. No surprise, this rally is broadening and those companies are getting a lot of AI love. So it’s just AI everywhere.”

Here’s the complete keynote analysis video:

2. Leading tech companies are integrating AI into infrastructure.

As today’s technological landscape continues to evolve, AI integration has become a necessity across industries, driving change in computing, storage and database infrastructure. For IBM Corp., the goal has been to revolutionize computing through AI-integrated storage.

“I think the storage itself has to be integrated or has to have AI integrated into it so that it can move and work as efficiently as the models it’s responsible for supporting. To that end, one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve really taken full advantage of the watsonx product line,” said Scott Baker, chief marketing officer and vice president of the IBM Hybrid Cloud portfolio and product marketing.

At Oracle Corp., the mission today is to make the company essential in meeting AI demands with cutting-edge database technology. That’s a necessity because companies store their data inside Oracle Database, and want to be able to use AI with that data, according to Leo Leung, vice president of OCI and technology at Oracle. 

“We see that as the next trend, and … our position as a database company, as a cloud company for critical workloads puts us, I think, in a really good position to go address that,” Leung said.

Dell Technologies Inc., meanwhile, is looking to forge a path for enterprise AI transformation, along with Nvidia. It’s all about helping customers through their journeys while meeting customers where they’re at, according to Scott Bils, vice president of gen AI professional services at Dell.

“Our combination of Dell and Nvidia professional services, as well, to provide a real turnkey solution for enterprises to help them address their biggest challenges, their most complex issues around adopting AI use cases and driving those into operations and production,” Bils said.

Here’s the complete video interview with Scott Baker:

3. AI integration is reshaping computing, storage and networking, but it will take time.

Nvidia GTC represented a new paradigm shift, and it became clear that there are various trends and innovations at play when it comes to embracing generative AI in software engineering. Still, there’s a way to go, and much to figure out when it comes to hallucination problems, according to Sarbjeet Johal, technology analyst and go-to-market strategist.

“It does coding, but it doesn’t do programming, what I call it. Long story short, this is just the beginning. It will take a while for AI to give the fruit, what we are promising through these narratives,” Johal said. “It’s going to be hurry up and wait, but definitely they are killing it with their compute speed and having the memory sitting next to the computer and the multi-terabyte.”

In the future, there is a transformative potential for AI and custom silicon when it comes to reshaping infrastructure through open standards and purpose-built designs for all workloads, according to Johal. The beauty of software-defined physical assets is that it’s possible to get the most juice out of them, he noted.

“Most of these things will need power to run and upkeep. We want to shut these things down when we don’t need them,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Nvidia GTC event:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Nvidia GTC 24 event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

Photo: SiliconANGLE