In 2026, the agenda has shifted from model training to practical applications: inference, autonomous AI agents and infrastructure capable of serving them in real time are at the center of discussions.
However, the key conclusion of the second day of the conference is not so much about technology as about money: the AI chip market is reaching a fundamentally new scale.
The $1 trillion market: betting on computational scarcity
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that total demand for the company’s AI chips – including the Blackwell and Rubin generations – will reach at least $1 trillion by 2027, double previous estimates, notes Business Insider.
This isn’t just a sales forecast, but the formation of a new market for computing infrastructure. According to the company, the industry is already undergoing an “inference tipping point” – a phase where the main load is not on training models, but on their mass use in products.
This shift dramatically increases the need for specialized chips: every AI service, from chatbots to autonomous agents, requires constant computation rather than one-time training of models.
The new AI economy
In fact, GTC 2026 records the birth of a new category – the AI agent computing market – where the key resource becomes not the model, but the ability to run it at scale.
If NVIDIA’s prediction is realized, the chip industry will become a trillion-dollar segment for the first time in such a short period of time – faster than what happened with cloud services or the mobile economy.
The big question now is not whether this market will grow, but who will be able to maintain control of its infrastructure.
Despite optimistic forecasts, the market faces a number of structural constraints:
– A shortage of computing capacity – companies are already losing revenue due to a lack of data centers, states Die Welt;
– investors’ doubts about the return on large-scale investments in AI infrastructure;
– geopolitical risks, including restrictions on technology exports
In addition, rapid growth raises fears of overheating: some analysts question the sustainability of the current investment cycle.
