Nvidia declares AI a trillion-dollar industry

At the GTC 2026 developer conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined the next phase of artificial intelligence and projected a new scale for the market. According to Huang, demand for AI infrastructure alone could reach at least one trillion US dollars by 2027.

This marks a significant upward revision of previous expectations. Just one year earlier, Nvidia had estimated the market at around five hundred billion US dollars. The updated forecast reflects rapidly growing demand for computing power, driven primarily by cloud providers and major technology companies.

At the center of this development is a structural shift within the AI industry. While the first phase focused mainly on training large models, the emphasis is now increasingly shifting toward their application. This so-called inference phase describes the deployment of AI systems in real-world environments, including automated decision-making, language systems and industrial use cases. Nvidia sees this transition as the next major growth driver for the industry.

Huang described the shift as a fundamental transformation in computing architecture. Artificial intelligence is evolving from a specialized technology into a core infrastructure layer that will increasingly underpin nearly all sectors of the economy. Companies and governments are already investing heavily in data centers to build the capacity required for this expansion.

Alongside this outlook, Nvidia introduced new systems and chip architectures designed specifically for the demands of this next phase. These include processors and integrated systems optimized for different AI workloads, aiming to increase processing speed and handle growing data volumes more efficiently.

The scale of the development is reflected in Nvidia’s recent growth. The company has significantly increased its revenue in recent years and has become a central player in the global AI market. Demand for chips and computing power is widely seen as one of the key bottlenecks in the industry. At the same time, reliance on a small number of providers continues to grow.

With this latest forecast, artificial intelligence moves firmly into the scale of traditional key industries. The pace of development in the coming years will largely depend on how quickly global AI infrastructure can be expanded.

SK