Jensen Huang says Nvidia will grow 70% next year. Here is what that number actually means.

Key points

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly repeated his forecast of 70% year-on-year revenue growth at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology conference on Thursday.
• Analysts expect Nvidia to close its current fiscal year near $400 billion in revenue, meaning 70% growth would land around $680 billion in the following year.
• One Nvidia computer system combining 36 Grace CPUs (the main processors) with 72 Blackwell GPUs (the specialised chips that do the heavy number-crunching AI needs) is currently growing sales at 27% month over month.
• Huang said Nvidia has reviewed $100 billion worth of revenue contracts held by startups it has invested in, and calls those investments low-risk bets.
• Competing chips from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and startups like Cerebras are all trying to take Nvidia's market share.

Why does Nvidia think it can see the future?

Huang's confidence comes from one simple fact: almost every organisation building AI right now buys Nvidia hardware and reports its plans back to the company.

He told the Goldman Sachs conference that Nvidia tracks "every single gigawatt of land, power, shell", meaning every data centre building under construction anywhere on the planet. Cloud providers, smaller hosting companies called "neoclouds", and AI startups all feed Nvidia information about what they are ordering next. That gives Huang an unusually early look at where AI spending is headed.

"Nvidia runs every model. Every single lab can use us," he said, naming Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, as well as open-weight models, the kind anyone can download and run themselves.

What is Nvidia actually selling at these prices?

Nvidia started life making graphics cards for PC gamers, priced around $399. That framing, Huang argued, no longer fits.

The company's flagship product today is a full computer system: 36 Grace CPUs wired together with 72 Blackwell GPUs, connected by Nvidia's own high-speed link technology called NVLink, totalling roughly 2 million parts and drawing 250,000 kilowatts of power. Huang put the price of one such system at $8.5 million.

Thousands of those systems are shipping right now, with month-over-month sales growing at 27%.

Should investors and workers worry about the competition?

Competitors are real. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all building their own AI chips to reduce dependence on Nvidia. Startups like Cerebras have gone public specifically to offer an alternative.

Huang's counter-argument is that Nvidia's product is no longer just a chip. It is the entire stack: the hardware, the software that runs on it, the supply chain, and the relationships with every major buyer. Switching that out takes years.

That said, one honest caveat is worth noting here. Nvidia itself admits that a large slice of today's AI spending comes from AI startups burning investor money on their own AI experiments. As the industry matures, those companies will almost certainly get more efficient and buy less hardware. Growth at 70% a year cannot continue indefinitely.

First reported by TechCrunch AI, Huang's remarks also touched on Nvidia's practice of investing in AI startups that then buy its hardware. Critics have compared this to deals that helped sink telecoms supplier Lucent Technologies in the early 2000s. Huang brushed that off: "We put in $1 and $100 comes back in," he said, adding that Nvidia only invests after checking that a company already holds real customer contracts.

The honest takeaway: Nvidia's numbers are genuinely extraordinary right now. But extraordinary streaks in tech always attract competition and, eventually, efficiency gains that slow the spending. If you work in or invest in any part of the AI supply chain, the next 12 months look strong. The year after that is a more open question.