NVIDIA Details GTC 2026: 30,000+ Attendees, 1,000+ Sessions, and Full-Stack AI Agenda

NVIDIA announced on March 3, 2026 that GTC 2026 will take place March 16-19 in San Jose, California, positioning the event as a broad AI and accelerated computing forum rather than a narrow product launch stage. According to the company, more than 30,000 attendees from over 190 countries are expected, spanning developers, researchers, enterprise operators, and startup teams. The headline message is that AI is now treated as infrastructure across sectors, and GTC is being framed around that infrastructure transition.

The keynote schedule is central to the event architecture. Jensen Huang is set to deliver the keynote at 11:00 a.m. PT on March 16 from SAP Center, with livestream and on-demand access via NVIDIA’s website. NVIDIA says the keynote will cover updates across accelerated compute, AI factories, open models, agentic systems, and physical AI. For markets and finance observers, the company also scheduled an investor and analyst Q&A for March 17 at 9:00 a.m. PT, adding a capital-markets layer to the technical program.

Program scale is also explicit in the release: 1,000+ sessions, nine full-day workshops, more than 60 hands-on labs, over 240 NVIDIA Inception startups, and more than 150 research poster presentations. Topic coverage spans large-scale inference, robotics, digital twins, scientific and quantum computing, and enterprise deployment workflows. This mix suggests GTC is designed to connect model-layer innovation with deployment realities such as systems integration, operational tooling, and workforce training.

Another notable signal is geographic and ecosystem breadth. NVIDIA describes GTC as a multi-venue citywide footprint in downtown San Jose and highlights participation from cloud vendors, model labs, application firms, and robotics players. In practical terms, that means attendees can compare not only model narratives but also partner alignment, go-to-market integration, and implementation maturity across adjacent layers of the AI stack.

For technical and product teams, the conference can serve as a roadmap validation checkpoint: what is demonstrable now, what remains pre-production, and where ecosystem dependencies are tightening. For enterprise decision-makers, the most useful output may be separating directional messaging from near-term deployable capabilities. GTC 2026 appears structured to offer both: strategic framing on the future of AI infrastructure and concrete implementation signals from sessions, labs, and partner showcases.