Reflections on GTC 2025 in Paris by VP of Tech Anthony Clarkson

I took a trip to Paris last week for the NVDIA GTC2025 event and it was wild, for a number of reasons, here’s why: 

• It was hot 26°C or about 80°F – last time I was in Paris for a conference it was cold and wet! 

• 180,000 visitors (to the wider Vivatech event combined with the GTC conference) meant a lot of queuing.  Getting into the Keynote took a while in various lines.  Getting out of the keynote wasn’t particularly fast either. 

• Jensen is a great speaker – you can tell that he’s not only passionate about his products and solutions but also about our whole industry.  It was so hot in Paris that he lost the trademark Leather Jacket a few minutes into the keynote! 

• The Tech – many exciting things to talk about but the highlights I took away were
  • NVLINK Spine – a backbone cabling solution (using copper(!) and including liquid cooling heat-pipes) that connects GPUs in a rack with a total bandwidth of 130 Terabytes per second.  That’s over 1 Pbps (petabit per second = 10^15 bits per second) – to put such a large number into context there are two ways of looking at that.  Firstly it is similar to the current peak of all internet traffic; Put another way it is about 1 million Gbps.  So if you have fibre broadband at home with 1Gig speeds, it’s a million times faster than that!  All in a single datacentre rack. 

• AI has progressed from Machine Learning and Generative AI (creating content from pre-learned data, think ChatGPT etc..) to Agentic AI and Physical AI. 

Agentic AI is a giant leap forward in AI – If you think about intelligence as being able to take previously learned information and using it to solve a previously unseen problem – like a doctor who has studied for many years but sees a new patient with a condition never seen before; the doctor uses intelligence and asks for help from other doctors to determine the best course of action.  Agentic AI is doing the same – taking masses of pre-learnt data, then reasoning and planning a solution by asking other agents for help.  AI Agents will become experts in their own trained environments and will be able to talk to other agents to solve problems. 

Physical AI is robotics, and these are already coming on in leaps and bounds. Autonomous Vehicles are now a reality – check out Waymo’s driverless taxis for example.  Tesla’s cars will autonomously drive themselves from the factory to the customer’s location, starting this month. This eliminates the need for traditional delivery methods like trucking or staff transport, potentially speeding up delivery times and streamlining the process 

• Personal AI processing – with the launch of DGX Spark which is a personal computer with the same NVDIA architecture as their datacentre builds that can run the same modelling.  A machine you can put on your desktop to revolutionise workload. 

• Quantum computing is getting closer to reality 

• The ecosystem is huge, and growing.  The exhibition at GTC in Paris showcased almost a thousand companies offering solutions, integrations etc.. from large companies like Microsoft and Google to a variety of small start-ups. 

I’m excited to have had the chance to attend GTC in Paris and am looking forward to collaborating with many of the people I met at the event, to help them with connectivity solutions.  Head over to T1nexus.com to learn more about out innovative solutions for future-proof connectivity.