By Kai Nicol-Schwarz,Katie Tarasov
Publication Date: 2026-03-20 12:03:00
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Nvidia’s yearly showcase event — dubbed the ‘Super Bowl of AI’ by some — kicked off at the start of the week to much fanfare across the tech sector. The event sees tens of thousands of attendees gather in California to get the latest on the world’s most valuable company’s plans for the future.
Didn’t manage to snag a ticket? No problem. I caught up with CNBC’s Katie Tarasov, who was on the ground at the event, to get a sense of what went down.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks during a news conference at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, March 17, 2026.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Kai: What were the key announcements this year?
Katie: I’m always watching for the biggest hardware announcements because it’s Nvidia chips that are filling AI data centers and powering almost every major company’s AI ambitions. We saw two big new chip announcements during CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote on Monday.
First was an entirely new type of chip called a Language Processing Unit, or LPU. It’s the first chip Nvidia’s unveiling using technology it acquired from chip startup Groq in December. That $20 billion deal was Nvidia’s biggest purchase ever. While Nvidia’s star graphics processing units have thousands of cores that perform many operations simultaneously, the Groq 3 LPU is built with a single core optimized…
