Nvidia's GTC Berlin: Huang's Whirlwind Tour, Robot Ducks and Neocloud Jitters

Nvidia's GTC in Berlin capped a week-and-a-half European swing for CEO Jensen Huang, who met with world leaders, rolled out new products and even paused to chat with small robot ducks on stage.

At a Thursday media Q&A, Huang offered a window into his approach to speeding up data center launches: "Try less sleep, which is what I do."

The conference's final day coincided with a selloff in publicly traded neocloud stocks. CoreWeave closed down 10%, and Nebius fell 7%, extending a rocky stretch for companies that lease out AI compute amid concerns over heavy borrowing. Huang struck a more bullish tone, telling CNBC that demand for neoclouds is "off the charts." Others at the show were less sanguine; one executive at an AI infrastructure company said the volume of businesses without a credit rating was "freaking the market out."

Onstage, Huang unveiled a product that fits seven of Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI racks into a shipping container built to travel on ordinary roads. The pitch: get AI compute running faster, since delays can cost billions in revenue. "By moving this into the supply chain, the speed by which we can turn on" will ramp up, he said.

Cost remains the elephant in the room. Huang told the Berlin audience a 1-gigawatt data center runs about $50 billion, while Goldman Sachs estimates AI-related capital spending could reach roughly $7.6 trillion from 2026 through 2031 across compute, data centers and power. In his CNBC interview, Huang said working capital is the missing middle: "The demand of the capital is much greater than the availability of the capital," though he added, "That's going to get solved." One executive at an AI infrastructure financing company predicted that "very soon capital will become the bottleneck."

Source: CNBC