From Chips to Agents: UChicago Watches NVIDIA’s Vision for the Next Era of AI

On Monday, March 16, the Data Science Institute partnered with NVIDIA to host a watch party of CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at their annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC). 

GTC 2026 drew more than 30,000 developers, researchers, and business leaders from over 190 countries. The UChicago watch party, co-hosted with the Research Computing Center and Corporate Engagement Office in partnership with NVIDIA, brought together roughly 80 campus community members for one of the most anticipated talks in AI each year.

This year’s keynote laid out NVIDIA’s vision for what Huang calls the “five-layer cake” of AI—energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications—and marked a clear shift in the industry’s focus from building infrastructure for model training, to deploying agentic and physical AI at scale. The headline hardware announcement was the Vera Rubin platform, which Huang called a “revolutionary supercomputer” representing 40 million times more compute than a decade ago. NVIDIA also unveiled NemoClaw, a new open-source platform for enterprise AI agents, and laid out a three-generation GPU roadmap extending through 2028.

The event offered the UChicago community a first look at technologies directly relevant to ongoing work at the intersection of AI and scientific discovery, from the next generation of computing infrastructure to emerging frameworks for agentic systems and physical AI applications in robotics, climate, and the life sciences.

“AI is becoming the infrastructure on which the next generation of scientific discovery will be built,” said Rebecca Willett, Worah Family Professor in the Wallman Society of Fellows, Department of Statistics, Computer Science, and the College and Faculty Director of AI at the DSI. “Events like this reflect the University’s commitment to ensuring our researchers and students are at the forefront of that transformation, engaging directly with the ideas and tools shaping the field in real time.”

Read about UChicago’s AI Initiatives here. For more information about how the DSI engages with industry, see DSI Industry Partnerships or reach out to Anne Brown, Director of Corporate Partnerships.