With GTC winding down today, we wanted to reflect on how the show is being viewed, especially CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote and his investor Q&A session. Setting aside the (merely) 19 press releases the company put out from the show and all the detail about its product roadmap for now, we think everyone seems to have taken a different message away from the event.
For investors, GTC was a bit of a disappointment. After years of crushing expectations and massive financial gains, Nvidia seems to have settled into ‘only’ doubling revenue this year. With Nvidia now the most widely scrutinized company on the planet, it has become very difficult for them to surprise investors. Their major announcements – Blackwell shipments, Blackwell Ultra, Vera, Rubin, even co-packed optics – have all been discussed in the press and blogosphere for months. With that kind of set up, even those major technical achievements were ‘disappointments’ in the eyes of the Street. There was no bad news, but just the absence of anything ‘new’ was enough to send the stock down.
By contrast, the wider semiconductor and electronics industry probably came away from the show more convinced of Nvidia’s lead in the industry, but even here, this is nothing new. We do not mean to diminish the company’s product advances, but the supply chain has been focussed on participating in the Nvidia-led AI build out for two years now. The keynote only confirmed that.
That being said, if we just step back and look at the company as just a company – things look incredibly strong. The company is advancing on every front. They put out a three year product roadmap, which the company claims is unprecedented, and is at the least, extremely rare. This is a very strong indicator of the strength of their hardware. In terms of software, Nvidia continues to extend its lead over not only competitors but many of its largest customers. Their Dynamo suite looks very intriguing, we will come back to it in the future, but for now we see it as another very bold bet from a company that has a pretty good track record on big bets. And of course the partners, so many partners – from GE and GM, to Dell and Cisco and beyond. The company seems to be cementing a formidable ecosystem which will stave off competitors for years.
All in all, if you have a six month time horizon for Nvidia, we understand how GTC could be ‘disappointing’. But for those with a longer time horizon, the company maintains its enviable position.
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