Why didn’t Wall Street win Nvidia’s big conference?

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage to deliver his annual GTC keynote on Monday, shares of the $4 trillion company began to fall.

Wall Street investors appeared unimpressed by the leather-jacket-clad founder’s bullish two-and-a-half-hour speech. Instead, they focused more attention on the uncertain future of artificial intelligence and fears of a bubble. The tension felt on Wall Street could not be more different from the tumultuous atmosphere of Silicon Valley, where confidence abounds but not uncertainty.

Huang spoke for more than two hours about the company’s latest innovations, from new video game graphics technology and updated network infrastructure to self-driving vehicle deals and a new chip designed with Groq to speed up AI inference in the Vera Rubin system. He also threw out some startling numbers about Nvidia’s business and beyond. Huang described the AI ​​agent ecosystem as a $35 trillion market, and the AI ​​and physical robotics industry as a $50 trillion market.

Huang also said he expects to see $1 trillion in orders for the company’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips — just two of Nvidia’s many products — by the end of 2027.

Shouldn’t that get investors excited? Not surprisingly, they’re not, Futurum CEO Daniel Newman told TechCrunch.

Great new uncertainty

“[AI] “It’s so good, it’s so transformative, and it’s moving so fast that we don’t actually understand what it will mean for all the things that are societal constructs that we’ve come to understand,” Newman said. “Markets hate uncertainty. The speed of innovation has actually created a great new state of uncertainty, which I think most people never expected.

Some of the uncertainty comes from misinformation coming out of the market, Newman said, and added that headlines about companies’ declining reliance on AI don’t paint the full picture — at least, based on the conversations he’s having.

“The adoption of AI in organizations will transform and scale very quickly,” Newman said. “I actually think it does. And when you say it doesn’t, I think what you’re probably saying is ‘fait accompli.’ [return on investment] Receipts remain somewhat unspecified, and companies cite surveys and reports that are largely six-month-old data. It takes months just to compile the data.”

This sentiment carries weight when you look at Nvidia’s numbers from past quarters. While companies may not tout their AI ROI, they are increasingly buying Nvidia’s technology. The company not only continues to meet its lofty goals and quarterly estimates, but exceeds them. Nvidia’s revenue rose 73% year over year last quarter.

There’s no sign of that changing anytime soon either. For example, Nvidia confirmed this week that Amazon has set a plan to purchase 1 million GPUs, along with other AI infrastructure, by the end of 2027 for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Reuters reports.

Kevin Cook, chief equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, agreed with Newman and joked to TechCrunch that investors being unhappy doesn’t change the fact that the entire stock market is powered by Nvidia, because its technology runs the rails for many of these companies.

“The economics kind of revolve around Nvidia,” Cook said. “It’s building this necessary infrastructure. All of these different companies in hardware, software, physical AI — even Caterpillar is now into physical AI — that rely on these platforms.”

None of this is to say that there is not an AI bubble currently or that there cannot be one in the future. But while the GTC may not have been a boon for Nvidia stock, the broader uncertainty doesn’t appear to be a problem for Nvidia. The company is clearly going full steam ahead, with the entire global economy seemingly on its side.

“Nvidia, as you know, is a platform company,” Huang said in his GTC keynote. “We have the technology. We have our platforms. We have a rich ecosystem, and today probably 100% of the $100 trillion industry is here.”