Why Wall Street wasn’t attracted to NVIDIA’s big conference

After Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at the annual GTC keynote on Monday, the $4 trillion company’s stock price began to fall.

Wall Street investors seemed unfazed by the leather-jacketed founder’s two-and-a-half-hour bullish speech. Instead, they focused more on AI’s uncertain future and bubble concerns. The tension on Wall Street is not unlike the bustling atmosphere in Silicon Valley, where confidence rather than uncertainty prevails.

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 car transactions and a new chip designed with Groq to accelerate AI inference on the Vera Rubin system. He also released some eye-popping numbers about NVIDIA’s business and other areas. Huang said the AI ​​agent ecosystem is a $35 trillion market, and the physical AI and robotics industry is a $50 trillion market.

Huang also said that the company expects to receive $1 trillion worth of orders by the end of 2027 for its Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips (just two of Nvidia’s many products).

Shouldn’t that be exciting investors? No wonder that’s not the case, Futurum CEO Daniel Neuman told TechCrunch.

new big uncertainties

“[AI] “This is so great, so transformative, and happening so fast that we don’t really understand what it means for all of the social structures we’ve come to understand,” Newman said. In fact, I think the speed of innovation is creating significant new uncertainties that most people did not anticipate. ”

Part of that uncertainty comes from misleading information coming out of the market, Neumann said, adding that headlines about low enterprise AI adoption rates don’t paint the whole picture, at least judging from his conversations.

“Enterprise AI adoption will change and expand rapidly,” Newman said. “I actually think that’s what’s happening. When you say it’s not, I think that’s probably what you mean.” [return on investment] And the receipts are still a little unclear, with companies citing surveys and reports that are mainly data from six months ago. It only takes a few months to aggregate the data. ”

This sentiment carries weight when you look at Nvidia’s past quarter numbers. Companies may not be touting the ROI of AI, but they are increasingly purchasing Nvidia’s technology. The company continues to grow and exceed its lofty goals and quarterly forecasts. Nvidia’s revenue increased 73% year-over-year last quarter.

There are no signs of that changing anytime soon. For example, just this week, Reuters reported that Nvidia confirmed that Amazon plans to buy 1 million GPUs for Amazon Web Services (AWS) by the end of 2027, along with other AI infrastructure.

Kevin Cook, senior equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, agreed with Newman, joking to TechCrunch that even if investors aren’t happy, it doesn’t change the fact that the entire stock market is powered by Nvidia. This is because NVIDIA’s technology supports many of these businesses.

“The economy kind of revolves around Nvidia,” Cook said. “We’re building the infrastructure that we need. All the different companies in hardware, software, physical AI, now even Caterpillar is physical AI, are building on top of these platforms.”

None of this means that AI bubbles don’t exist today or that there may not be AI bubbles in the future. But while GTC may not have been a boon for Nvidia’s stock price, widespread uncertainty doesn’t seem to be Nvidia’s problem. The company is clearly moving full speed ahead and appears to be bringing the entire global economy along with it.

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