Nvidia CEO heralds ‘inference inflection’ as next phase of AI boom,
backed by $1 trillion in orders
[March 17, 2026] By
MICHAEL LIEDTKE
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday elaborated on his vision for keeping
his company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom that he
predicted will produce a $1 trillion backlog in orders within the next
year.
Sporting his signature black leather jacket, Huang spent more than two
hours sauntering across a stage in a packed arena in San Jose,
California, explaining how Nvidia's processors became indispensable AI
components and highlighting the products that he believes will keep the
company in the catbird seat.
Huang, 63, also touched upon many of the themes that he has been
trumpeting since he emerged as one of Silicon Valley's most influential
voices during the past few years, including his thesis that the AI
buildup remains in its infancy.
“We reinvented computing, just like the PC (personal computer)
revolution and the internet revolution,” Huang proclaimed. “We are now
at the beginning of a new platform change.”
To hammer home his points, Huang predicted that Nvidia will be grappling
with a $1 trillion backlog in orders for its chips by the end of the
year, doubling his estimate from a year ago.
Nvidia has leveraged its dominant position in the AI chip market so far
to increase its annual revenue from $27 billion in 2022 to $216 billion
last year — a growth rate that has translated into a $4.5 trillion
market value for the Santa Clara, California, company.
But Nvidia's once-torrid stock has cooled since the company briefly
became the first to surpass a $5 trillion market value last October amid
worries that the the AI buzz is overblown.
“This is just a white-knuckle period for the technology industry,” said
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.
Even after Nvidia released a quarterly report in late February that far
exceeded analyst forecasts and management provided a rosy outlook, the
company's stock price is still down by 6% from where it stood before
those numbers came out. After Huang's disclosure about an anticipated
doubling in backlogged chip orders, Nvidia's shares edged up by nearly
2% to close Monday at $183.22.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during an Nvidia conference focusing
on artificial intelligence in San Jose, Calif., Monday, March 16,
2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
 While analysts expect Nvidia's
revenue to surpass $330 billion for the upcoming year, the company
is facing its first serious challenges in the AI chip market as
other technology powerhouses such as Google and Facebook's corporate
parent Meta Platforms try to develop their own processors.
Nvidia's potential growth is being held back by security and trade
barriers imposed by the U.S. that have impeded the company's ability
to sell its advanced chips in China.
Huang envisions Nvidia maintaining its instrumental role in AI by
continuing to feed the feverish demand for chips that power chatbots
like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini and expanding its reach
into the emerging market for inference processors.
Once an AI tool is trained, inference chips enable the technology to
take what it has learned and produce responses — whether it be
writing a document or creating an image — more efficiently than the
processors that were used while the large language models were being
built.
“The inference inflection has arrived,” Huang said.
To help navigate its transition into the inference field, Nvidia
struck a multi-billion dollar licensing deal with market specialist
Groq that included the hiring of that startup's top engineers.
“Nvidia isn't going to cede any market share to Google or Meta,”
said Ives, who believes Nvidia's market value will eclipse $6
trillion during the next year or so.
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