NVIDIA will bring its GTC conference back to San Jose this month, turning the South Bay into another major gathering point for the artificial intelligence industry as companies across the sector race to define the next phase of AI. GTC 2026 is scheduled for March 16 through March 19 in San Jose, with workshops beginning March 15 and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote set for March 16 at SAP Center.
NVIDIA describes GTC as its flagship AI conference, with programming built around developers, researchers, business leaders, and enterprise users working across areas such as agentic AI, physical AI, inference, accelerated computing, and AI infrastructure. The event will include keynote presentations, technical sessions, exhibits, training, and certification opportunities, reflecting how broadly NVIDIA now operates across the modern AI stack.
That breadth is a major reason GTC carries unusual weight in the current market. It is not simply a company event for product announcements. It has become a venue where the direction of AI infrastructure, deployment, and commercialization is debated in real time by the companies building the hardware, software, and systems behind the industry’s expansion. NVIDIA’s decision to center that conversation in San Jose reinforces the Bay Area’s role as the physical meeting ground for the AI economy, even as the companies involved operate across a wider regional footprint.
The speaker lineup reflects just how expansive the event has become. Confirmed NVIDIA speakers include Jensen Huang, Ian Buck, Kari Briski, Xinzhou Wu, Bill Dally, Kevin Deierling, Stephen Jones, Jim Fan, Rama Akkiraju, Bryan Catanzaro, Ronnie Vasishta, John Spitzer, and David Reber. Those names span major parts of the company’s business, including hyperscale and high-performance computing, AI software, automotive, research, networking, telecommunications, developer performance, applied deep learning, and security.
The conference also pulls in executives and leaders from outside NVIDIA, underscoring that GTC now reaches far beyond the company’s own ecosystem. NVIDIA’s published speaker list includes Uber’s Sarfraz Maredia, Red Hat CTO and senior vice president Chris Wright, KUKA chief product officer Melonee Wise, CrowdStrike’s Mike Petronaci, Amazon vice president Muthu Muthukrishnan, F5 chief product officer Kunal Anand, PepsiCo chief strategy officer Jim Andrew, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun, Universal Music Group CEO Lucien Grainge, Medivis co-founder and CEO Osamah Choudhry, Stanford professors Le Cong and Chelsea Finn, and California Department of Transportation CIO Marcie Kahbody.
That mix gives GTC a wider identity than a traditional chip or software conference. The event brings together participants from cloud computing, robotics, transportation, cybersecurity, retail, media, healthcare, academia, and government. In practice, that means the conference is increasingly about how AI gets built and deployed across industries rather than about processors or models in isolation.
The structure of the event reinforces that point. NVIDIA’s official conference materials describe a multi-day program that includes sessions, expert meetups, exhibits, workshops, training labs, and certification components. The company is also promoting hands-on learning and technical deep dives alongside the keynote, suggesting that GTC is designed to serve both as a headline-making event and as a working conference for engineers, developers, and enterprise teams.
For the Bay Area, GTC adds to an already busy stretch of major technology conferences. San Francisco has continued to attract large AI, developer, and software events, while San Jose remains a natural venue for conferences tied more directly to semiconductors, infrastructure, and enterprise systems. NVIDIA’s return to San Jose fits squarely into that pattern and highlights the continued importance of in-person gatherings in an industry still moving at extraordinary speed.
As NVIDIA gathers executives, researchers, developers, and industry partners in San Jose, GTC is expected to highlight not just the company’s next moves, but the broader direction of the AI economy. For the Bay Area, the conference is another sign that the region remains a central stage for the technologies and companies shaping the next phase of the industry.
Read our coverage of Microsoft Build in San Francisco for another look at how major AI and developer conferences are reshaping the Bay Area tech calendar.
