Do you want to build a snowman? Go to space? Construct a workforce out of 110 kinds of robot? Accelerate the entire timeline of Artificial Intelligence? If so, there was plenty of sizzle on offer from Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, at the company’s two hour-long GTC keynote event in San Jose Monday.
NVIDIA, the world’s leading purveyor of AI-friendly GPU chips, has 4.4 trillion reasons to dazzle us with potential futures allegedly brought to you by ever-accelerating AI technology. In other words, Huang needs to protect NVIDIA’s current $4.4 trillion market cap, double what it was two years ago, by proving it isn’t a bubble.
Result: Huang peppered a presentation of impenetrable charts with dazzling visions of data centers in orbit, and awkwardly extra interactions with a robot version of Olaf from Frozen.
But beneath the future sizzle, the actual steak of present-day practical announcements — for consumers, at least — was limited to an AI gaming software update that got a thumbs down from gamers, plus NVIDIA muscling in on the OpenClaw AI agent action. Here’s a summary of everything Huang had to say:
Next-generation AI gaming software
Huang’s first reveal: NVIDIA DLSS 5, the next iteration of the company’s DLSS AI upscaling software, coming this fall. NVIDIA describes it as a “breakthrough in visual fidelity” that “infuses pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials, bridging the gap between rendering and reality.” Huang showed off before and after comparisons using Resident Evil: Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy, and Starfield.
Trouble is, Resident Evil: Requiem, released two weeks ago (here’s our review), has already won the hearts of gamers for its graphics — so many took to social media, furious that NVIDIA was trying to fix what wasn’t broken.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
AI is still accelerating?
So claims Huang, who showcased a chart highlighting AI developments of recent years. It began in 2023 with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It continued in 2024 with OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, and in 2025 with Anthropic’s coding assistant, Claude Code (which, Huang was proud to boast, is now used by 100% of his company). Now, in 2026, Huang sees NVIDIA and the entire AI industry reaching an “inflection point for inference.”
Mashable Light Speed
What does that mean? Huang says the value of his chips isn’t so much in training large language models any more. NVIDIA’s customers have tipped over into deploying those AI models in more novel ways, growing the ecosystem for AI agents.
Speaking of which …
NVIDIA doubles down on open-source AI agents
“Claude Code and OpenClaw have sparked the agent inflection point,” Huang pronounced. (OpenClaw, formerly Clawdbot, is a popular AI assistant with some security issues.) NVIDIA adds a protective layer of security and stability that it’s calling Nemo Claw; you can try it now, in a preview version.
Beyond that, it makes sense for NVIDIA to grow the entire agentic ecosystem as soon as possible, whether or not those agents are actually working reliably. So the company is offering an expansive new NVIDIA AI Agent Toolkit for companies that want to build their own models.
The company is also offering a complex reasoning AI model of its own, one with what is possibly the most grandiose sci-fi name in tech today: the Nemotron 3 omni-understanding model.
Space and the robot snowman
Huang accelerated his cosmic vision towards the end of the keynote. We’re not talking NVIDIA Cosmos 3, another grandly-named AI model, but a vision of Vera Rubin Space-1 — which Huang says will be the first data center in space. There’s no timeline for development, let alone launch, but NVIDIA apparently has a “lot of great engineers” working on it.
A lot of great Imagineers worked on Olaf the snowman from Frozen, too. And they could be forgiven for cringing a little when Huang closed the keynote having a conversation with Olaf the snowman robot — one of 110 AI-powered robots on display in San Jose, all from NVIDIA-partnered companies (in this case, Disney).
Olaf is pretty cool, and I wouldn’t mind running into one in a Disney park in the future. But Huang repeatedly tripped over Olaf’s lines, and the fact that our favorite feisty snowman didn’t adjust to the conversational situation made him seem … well, a little less than artificially intelligent.
At the two-hour mark, Huang exited to the bizarre accompaniment of AI-generated country music, apparently coming from his own avatar and a bunch of robots sitting around a campfire on screen. And the audience was left with two possible futures. In one, the AI agents NVIDIA is championing help launch the company into the stratosphere. In the other, AI agents act like a bunch of bumbling Olafs, and continue to deliver little ROI for companies — in which case NVIDIA’s market position may melt like a snowman in spring.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Nvidia
