It’s not an easy task to dominate the news cycle at a technology show as large as the annual CES gathering in Las Vegas, with over 4,000 exhibiting companies, 6,900 media participants and more than 148,000 attendees. Yet that is exactly what Nvidia Corp. did in January.

The AI powerhouse unveiled Alpamayo, a new open family of AI models designed to improve safety and reliability for autonomous driving systems, and Vera Rubin, the firm’s six-chips-in-one machine to drive AI supercomputing. The Rubin platform represents Nvidia’s answer to questions about what enterprises will need for the AI factory, reflecting the company’s vision for the shift taking place from computing as infrastructure to computing as production.

From March 16 to 19, Nvidia will have an opportunity to make news again during the company’s annual Nvidia GTC gathering in San Jose. After revealing the roadmap for physical AI and the future of enterprise computing during CES, Nvidia is expected to add to its chip portfolio and provide new insight into its vision for artificial intelligence in the full stack.

This year’s GTC is less about splashy hardware reveals and more about what it takes to run AI at large scale — from silicon to software to the operational realities of production. The announcements will likely underscore the company’s continued influence in the direction of AI, a position that some still take lightly, according to Dave Vellante, chief analyst at theCUBE Research. SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE will air our exclusive coverage of Nvidia GTC on March 20, delivering analyst interviews and on-the-ground insight into the company’s latest announcements and broader market impact.

“As amazing as Nvidia’s progress has been, I think observers continue to underestimate the potential of the company and its ecosystem,” Vellante said. “We’re seeing a massive shift in computing architectures take place in real time, powered by AI factories. GTC has become the most important conference in the tech industry and is a must-attend event to learn about what’s next.”

Tune in to theCUBE’s Nvidia GTC coverage for interviews with experts from Nvidia, Ernst & Young, WekaIO, Elasticsearch, Texas Instruments, Zededa and more. In addition to compute breakthroughs, coverage will examine how networking, automation and observability are becoming foundational to AI factory design, particularly as inference becomes more distributed across data center, edge and wide-area network environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Resetting AI infrastructure

A key element from Nvidia’s announcements in January is that the company is resetting how AI infrastructure is built. As noted by SiliconANGLE’s Vellante and David Floyer, the substantial graphics processing unit and central processing unit gains announced by Nvidia align compute, networking, memory and software to minimize single bottlenecks that limit the overall system. Rather than shipping chips, the company is now delivering tightly integrated systems engineered to maximize throughput, utilization, and economic efficiency at the scale required for AI factories.

As AI factories scale and inference spreads beyond centralized clusters, enterprises are being forced to rethink how they evaluate network performance. Traditional metrics, such as raw port speeds, are giving way to outcome-based measures, including GPU utilization, job completion time and inference latency.

“Networking is now the control plane for AI infrastructure,” said Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. “Deterministic performance, congestion management and real-time telemetry will determine GPU productivity and cost efficiency.”

That shift elevates high-performance Ethernet fabrics, automation frameworks and integrated observability as critical components of the AI stack. As power constraints increasingly shape AI factory design, so-called “scale across” architectures are expected to gain attention at GTC, enabling distributed performance while managing energy and thermal limits. In this model, the network becomes a core part of the AI supply chain rather than a background utility.

From chip supplier to ecosystem anchor

One outcome of Nvidia’s market positioning and technological chess moves has been a surge of partnership and purchasing activity. Meta Platforms Inc. recently announced a new deal with Nvidia to buy millions of its next-generation Vera Rubin graphics processing units and a similar number of Grace central processing units to fuel its artificial intelligence strategy.

In late February, Nvidia announced a partnership with Akamai, Forescout, Palo Alto Networks, Siemens and Xage Security to improve cybersecurity in operational technology and industrial control system environments through the use of centralized AI. Model developer World Labs Inc., founded by pioneering AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, received recent funding from Nvidia as part of its ongoing research collaboration.

All of this sets the stage for what will likely be a series of significant announcements from Nvidia at GTC in March that will provide the tech industry with yet another glimpse into the future of AI and enterprise computing. If 2025 was defined by unprecedented GPU buildouts, 2026 may hinge on how well organizations architect networks, automate operations and align infrastructure to measurable business outcomes.

“The advancements we have seen in AI to date will pale in comparison to the innovations that are coming, which will drive new levels of enterprise productivity,” Vellante said. “Moreover, advancements in healthcare, retail, materials science, logistics, physical AI and more are going to blow away our expectations.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of Nvidia GTC on March 20. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Nvidia GTC, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE podcasts

SiliconANGLE’s “theCUBE Pod” is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, which you can enjoy while on the go. During each podcast, SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante unpack the biggest trends in enterprise tech — from AI and cloud to regulation and workplace culture — with exclusive context and analysis.

SiliconANGLE also produces our weekly “Breaking Analysis” program, where Dave Vellante examines the top stories in enterprise tech, combining insights from theCUBE with spending data from Enterprise Technology Research, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.

Nvidia GTC Guests

During Nvidia GTC, theCUBE analysts will talk with industry experts from Nvidia, Ernst & Young, WekaIO, Elasticsearch, Texas Instruments and Zededa, among others, about the latest breakthroughs in enterprise computing, from generative AI and AI-powered use cases to high-performance computing and the expanding role of edge computing in AI.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Nvidia GTC AI Conference & Expo. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE