Nvidia took San Jose by storm this year, with a record-breaking 25,000 attendees flocking to the San Jose Convention Center and surrounding downtown buildings. Many workshops, talks, and panels were so packed that people had to lean against walls or sit on the floor and suffer the wrath of organizers shouting commands to get them to line up properly.Nvidia currently sits at the top of the AI world, with record-breaking financials, sky-high profit margins, and no serious competitors yet. But the coming months also hold unprecedented risk for the company as it faces U.S. tariffs, DeepSeek, and shifting priorities from top AI customers.At GTC 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attempted to project confidence, unveiling powerful new chips, personal supercomputers, and, of course, really cute robots. It was an exhaustive sales pitch one aimed at investors reeling from Nvidias nosediving stock.The more you buy, the more you save, Huang said at one point during a keynote on Tuesday. Its even better than that. Now, the more you buy, the more you make.Inference boomMore than anything, Nvidia at this years GTC sought to assure attendees and the rest of the world watching that demand for its chips wont slow down anytime soon.During his keynote, Huang claimed that nearly the entire world got it wrong on traditional AI scaling falling out of vogue. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which earlier this year released a highly efficient reasoning model called R1, prompted fears among investors that Nvidias monster chips may no longer be necessary for training competitive AI.But Huang has repeatedly insisted that power-hungry reasoning models will, in fact, drive more demand for the companys chips, not less. Thats why at GTC, Huang showed off Nvidias next line of Vera Rubin GPUs, claiming theyll perform inference (that is, run AI models) at roughly double the rate of Nvidias current best Blackwell chip.The threat to Nvidias business Huang spent less time addressing was upstarts like Cerebras, Groq, and other low-cost inference hardware and cloud providers. Nearly every hyperscaler is developing a custom chip for inference, if not training, as well. AWS has Graviton and Inferentia (which its reportedly aggressively discounting), Google has TPUs, and Microsoft has Cobalt 100.Image Credits:Justin Sullivan / Getty ImagesAlong the same vein, tech giants currently extremely reliant on Nvidia chips, including OpenAI and Meta, are looking to reduce those ties via in-house hardware efforts. If they and the aforementioned other rivals are successful, itll almost assuredly weaken Nvidias stranglehold on the AI chips market.Thats perhaps why Nvidias share price dipped around 4% following Huangs keynote. Investors mightve been holding out hope for one last thing or perhaps an accelerated launch window. In the end, they got neither.Tariff tensionsNvidia also sought to allay worries about tariffs at GTC 2025. The U.S. hasnt imposed any tariffs on Taiwan (where Nvidia gets most of its chips), and Huang claimed tariffs wouldnt do significant damage in the short run. He stopped short of promising that Nvidia would be shielded from the long-term economic impacts, however whatever form they ultimately take.Nvidia has clearly received the Trump Administrations America First message, with Huang pledging at GTC to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on manufacturing in the U.S. While that would help the company diversify its supply chains, its also a massive cost for Nvidia, whose multitrillion-dollar valuation depends on healthy profit margins.New businessAs it looks to seed and grow businesses other than its core chips line, Nvidia at GTC drew attention to its new investments in quantum, an industry that the company has historically neglected. At GTCs first Quantum Day, Huang apologized to the CEOs of major quantum companies for causing a minor stock crash in January 2025 after he suggested that the tech wouldnt be very useful for the next 15 to 30 years.Image Credits:David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty ImagesOn Tuesday, Nvidia announced that it would open a new center in Boston, NVAQC, to advance quantum computing in collaboration with leading hardware and software markers. The center will, of course, be equipped with Nvidia chips, which the company says will enable researchers to simulate quantum systems and the models necessary for quantum error correction.In the more immediate future, Nvidia sees what its calling personal AI supercomputers as a potential new revenue-maker.At GTC, the company launched DGX Spark (previously called Project Digits) and DGX Station, both of which are designed to allow users to prototype, fine-tune, and run AI models in a range of sizes at the edge. Neither is exactly inexpensive they retail for thousands of dollars but Huang boldly proclaimed that they represent the future of the personal PC.This is the computer of the age of AI, Huang said during his keynote. This is what computers should look like, and this is what computers will run in the future.Well soon see if customers agree.