Why Wall Street wasn’t won over by Nvidia’s big conference

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

It appears Wall Street investors were unimpressed by the leather-jacketed founder’s optimistic 2.5-hour speech. Instead, they placed more emphasis on the uncertain future of AI and the fear of a bubble. The nervousness of Wall Street couldn’t be more different from the buzzing atmosphere of Silicon Valley, where confidence, not uncertainty, abounds.

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

Huang also said he expects $1 trillion in purchase 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, that’s not the case, Futurum CEO Daniel Neuman told TechCrunch.

A major new uncertainty

“[AI] is so good, so transformative and so fast that we don’t really understand what it’s going to mean for all the things that are the social constructs that we’ve come to understand,” Neuman said. “The markets hate uncertainty. The speed of innovation has actually created a huge new uncertainty that I don’t think most people ever expected.”

Some of that uncertainty stems from misleading information coming out of the market, said Neuman, who added that headlines about low adoption of AI by companies don’t paint the full picture — at least, based on the conversations he’s having.

“The adoption of AI by companies will reach a transition and scale very quickly,” said Neuman. “I actually think it happens. If you say it doesn’t, I think you’re probably saying it does.” [return on investment] and revenues are still a bit undefined and companies are citing the surveys and reports that are largely six months old data. It just takes months to collect data.”

This sentiment carries weight when you look at Nvidia’s numbers over the past few quarters. While companies may not pay much attention to their AI ROI, they are increasingly buying Nvidia’s technology. The company not only continues to beat its lofty targets and quarterly estimates, but flies past them. Nvidia’s revenue rose 73% year-over-year last quarter.

There are also no signs that this will change in the short term. For example, this week Nvidia confirmed that Amazon had made a plan to purchase 1 million GPUs, among other AI infrastructure, for Amazon Web Services (AWS) by the end of 2027. according to Reuters reporting.

Kevin Cook, a senior equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research, agreed with Neuman, joking to TechCrunch that investor dissatisfaction doesn’t change the fact that the entire stock market is backed by Nvidia, because technology is driving many of these companies.

“The economy pretty much revolves around Nvidia,” Cook said. “It’s building this necessary infrastructure. All these different companies in hardware and software and physical AI – even Caterpillar is now physical AI – that are building on these platforms.”

None of this means that there isn’t an AI bubble now, or that there might not be one in the future. But while GTC may not have been a boon for Nvidia stock, the broader uncertainty doesn’t appear to be Nvidia’s problem. The company is clearly running full speed ahead and is seemingly taking the entire world economy to task.

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