Live: Jen-Hsun Huang Kicks Off NVIDIA's 2016 GPU Technology Conference The Official NVIDIA Blog

The first GTC took place in a set of hotel ballrooms a few blocks away. That's up from 4,000 last year, a growth rate that's tracked pretty steady since the start of the show. The stage is about five feet off the ground. And on the vast screen is an NVIDIA-green moving image that, as it scans looks like a multi-level rendering of the brain's neural network. With some electronics thrown in between. A great many of those here, though, are scientists and analysts of the computational sort -- those who rely on NVIDIA GPUs to help them crunch the rising sea of data that's engulfing us. A lot are associated with universities, close to 200 of them. Virtually every one of the top 100 university comp sci departments are here. There are also hundreds of companies represented--certainly the dozens of major web-services companies that use artificial intelligence. But also industrials, oil and gas, retail. Err, less so this time. But folks don't seem to mind.