The “Token Economy” and AI Factories

Central to Huang’s vision is the concept of “tokens” as the fundamental building blocks of AI and the emergence of “AI factories” as specialized data centers designed for generative computing.

“This is how intelligence is made, a new kind of factory generator of tokens, the building blocks of AI. Tokens have opened a new frontier,” Huang told the audience. He emphasized that tokens can “transform images into scientific data charting alien atmospheres,” “decode the laws of physics,” and “see disease before it takes hold.”

This vision represents a shift from traditional “retrieval computing” to “generative computing,” where AI understands context and generates answers rather than just fetching pre-stored data. According to Huang, this transition necessitates a new kind of data center architecture where “the computer has become a generator of tokens, not a retrieval of files.”

Blackwell Architecture Delivers Massive Performance Gains

The NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture, now in “full production,” delivers what the company claims is “40x the performance of Hopper” for reasoning models under identical power conditions. The architecture includes support for FP4 precision, leading to significant energy efficiency improvements.

“ISO power, Blackwell is 25 times,” Huang stated, highlighting the dramatic efficiency gains of the new platform.

The Blackwell architecture also supports extreme scale-up through technologies like NVLink 72, enabling the creation of massive, unified GPU systems. Huang predicted that Blackwell’s performance will make previous generation GPUs significantly less desirable for demanding AI workloads.

Predictable Roadmap for AI Infrastructure

NVIDIA outlined a regular annual cadence for its AI infrastructure innovations, allowing customers to plan their investments with greater certainty:

Blackwell Ultra (Second half of 2025): An upgrade to the Blackwell platform with increased FLOPs, memory, and bandwidth.
Vera Rubin (Second half of 2026): A new architecture featuring a CPU with doubled performance, a new GPU, and next-generation NVLink and memory technologies.
Rubin Ultra (Second half of 2027): An extreme scale-up architecture aiming for 15 exaflops of compute per rack.

Democratizing AI: From Networking to Models

To realize the vision of widespread AI adoption, NVIDIA announced comprehensive solutions spanning networking, hardware, and software. At the infrastructure level, the company is addressing the challenge of connecting hundreds of thousands or even millions of GPUs in AI factories through significant investments in silicon photonics technology.

While building the foundation for large-scale AI factories, NVIDIA is simultaneously bringing AI computing power to individuals and smaller teams. The company introduced a new line of DGX personal AI supercomputers powered by the Grace Blackwell platform, aimed at empowering AI developers, researchers, and data scientists.

Physical AI and Robotics: A $50 Trillion Opportunity

NVIDIA sees physical AI and robotics as a “$50 trillion opportunity,” according to Huang. The company announced the open-source NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1, described as a “generalist foundation model for humanoid robots.”

Agentic AI and Industry Transformation

Huang defined “agentic AI” as AI with “agency” that can “perceive and understand the context,” “reason,” and “plan and take action,” even using tools and learning from multimodal information.

The Bottom Line

Jensen Huang’s GTC 2025 keynote presented a comprehensive vision of an AI-driven future characterized by intelligent agents, autonomous robots, and purpose-built AI factories. NVIDIA’s announcements across hardware architecture, networking, software, and open-source models signal the company’s determination to power and accelerate the next era of computing.

As computing continues its shift from retrieval-based to generative models, NVIDIA’s focus on tokens as the core currency of AI and on scaling capabilities across cloud, enterprise, and robotics platforms provides a roadmap for the future of technology, with far-reaching implications for industries worldwide.