Apple did not immediately ‌respond to a request for comment [File]
| Photo Credit: AP

Instagram will no longer support end-to-end encrypted messaging in a few months [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

When Jensen Huang strides onto the ​stage of a packed hockey arena to kick off Nvidia’s annual developer conference on Monday, he is likely to reveal products and partnerships geared toward ‌keeping the AI chipmaker atop a growing array of competitors.

Taking over the heart of Silicon Valley for most ​of a week, Nvidia GTC, as the conference is known, has become CEO Huang’s preferred event to show off ⁠Nvidia’s AI advances in chips, data centres, its chip programming software CUDA, digital assistants known as AI agents, and physical AI such as robots.

This year, the four-day event is even more crucial as investors will seek assurance that Nvidia’s strategy of plowing back its profits into the AI ecosystem is paying off. “I ‌expect Nvidia to present a full-stack roadmap update from Rubin to Feynman while emphasizing inference, agentic AI, networking, and AI factory infrastructure,” said eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne, using the names for Nvidia’s current and forthcoming generations of chips.

Nvidia’s chips sit ‌at the center of hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in data centres by governments and companies around the globe, ‌but ⁠the company is facing competition from other chipmakers and even from some of its customers who are developing their own ⁠chips.

Analysts told Reuters they expect that overall AI chip market to keep growing, but Nvidia’s slice to shrink somewhat as the AI chip market changes rapidly to where AI agents scurry back and forth among computer applications carrying out tasks on behalf of humans. That is a shift from training, where AI labs link many Nvidia chips ​together into one computer to chew through huge amounts of ‌data to perfect their AI models.

Those agents are expected to become so numerous that the humans asking them to do work will even need a new layer of AI middle managers, what technologists call an “orchestration” layer, to sit between human users and their fleets of agents.

In some ways, analysts say, that’s a good thing for Nvidia, because it signals that AI is becoming more ‌useful.

But those tasks, broadly known as “inference” in the AI industry, can also run on other kinds of chips, including ​the ones that big Nvidia customers such as OpenAI and Meta, which recently said it plans to release new AI chips every six months, can build for themselves.

“Nvidia is definitely going to see more competition compared to a year ⁠ago,” said KinNgai Chan, a managing director at Summit Insights Group. “Nvidia still has close to over 90% market share in both training and inference markets today.”

“We think Nvidia will begin to see share loss starting in 2027, once in-house ASIC programs gain some scale especially in the inference ‌market,” he said, referring to application-specific integrated circuits, chips tailored for a single function or custom workload, offering higher efficiency than general-purpose graphics processing units.

The company spent $17 billion in December to purchase Groq, a chip startup that specialises in fast and cheap inference computing work. Talking about Groq on the company’s earnings call last month, Huang said the company would showcase at GTC how Nvidia can plug Groq’s ultra-fast AI technology into their existing CUDA platform.

William McGonigle, analyst at Third Bridge, said his firm expects Nvidia to roll out a new line of servers that will combine Groq’s chips with Nvidia’s networking technologies to create a speedy and cost-efficient product.

Another type of chip that ‌poses an increasing competitive threat to Nvidia is the central processor unit, or CPU, the kind of chip long championed by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

While those chips ​took a backseat to Nvidia’s graphics processor units (GPUs) in recent years, McGonigle said they are “back in focus” and expects Nvidia to show off servers that use only its CPUs, which Huang talked up on a recent earnings ⁠call.

“With the rise of agentic AI, the bottleneck is now at the agent orchestration level, which is carried out by the CPUs,” McGonigle said.

Analysts ⁠also expect Nvidia to elaborate on why it invested $2 billion each in Lumentum and Coherent, both of which make lasers for sending information between chips in the form of beams of light. Use of those lasers in what are called co-packaged ‌optics could help speed up the connections among Nvidia’s chips inside huge data centres, but they are not currently made in big enough volumes to match the number of chips Nvidia sells each year.

“Nvidia will likely frame co-packaged optics as key to connecting massive ​AI clusters more efficiently, but the challenge is making it affordable enough to deploy at scale,” said eMarketer’s Bourne.

Published – March 16, 2026 11:29 am IST

The settlement also resolved government ‌claims against two Adobe executives [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

U.S. Vice President JD Vance had in September said ​that the new U.S. ‌company will be valued at around $14 billion [File]
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The discussions will ‌likely take a year before any changes can be implemented [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

AI-created videos circulating on Elon Musk’s X depict American soldiers captured by Iran, an Israeli city in ruins, and U.S. embassies ablaze; a surge of lifelike deepfakes despite a policy crackdown to curb wartime disinformation.

The West Asia war has unleashed an avalanche of AI-generated visuals, eclipsing anything seen in previous conflicts and often leaving social media users unable to distinguish fabrication from reality, researchers say.

In a bid to protect “authentic information” during conflicts, X announced last week that it would suspend creators from its revenue sharing program for 90 days if they post AI-generated war videos without disclosing they were artificially made.

Subsequent violations will result in permanent suspension, X’s head of product Nikita Bier warned in a post.

The new policy is a notable pivot for a platform heavily criticised for becoming a haven of disinformation since Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of the site in October 2022.

It also won praise from senior U.S. State Department official Sarah Rogers, who called it a “great complement” to X’s Community Notes, a crowd-sourced verification system, that results in “less reach (thus monetisation)” for inaccurate content.

But disinformation researchers remain skeptical.

“The feeds I monitor are still flooded with AI-generated content about the war,” Joe Bodnar of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told AFP.

“It doesn’t seem like creators have been dissuaded from pushing misleading AI-generated images and videos about the conflict,” he said.

Bodnar pointed to a post from a premier “blue check” X account, which is eligible for monetisation, that shared an AI clip depicting an Iranian “nuclear-capable” strike on Israel.

The post garnered more views than Bier’s message about cracking down on AI content.

X did not respond when AFP asked how many accounts it had demonetised since Bier’s announcement.

AFP’s global network of fact-checkers, from Brazil to India, identified a stream of AI fakes about the West Asia war, many from X’s premium accounts with blue checkmarks that can be purchased.

They include AI videos depicting a tearful American soldier inside a bombed-out embassy, captured U.S. troops on their knees beside Iranian flags, and a destroyed U.S. navy fleet.

The flood of AI-fabricated visuals, mixed with authentic imagery from West Asia, continues to grow faster than professional fact-checkers can debunk them.

Grok, X’s own AI chatbot, appeared to make the problem worse, wrongly telling users seeking fact-checks that numerous AI visuals from the war were real.

Researchers have also warned that X’s model, allowing premium accounts to earn payouts based on engagement, has turbocharged the financial incentive to peddle false or sensational content.

One premium account, which posted an AI video of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper engulfed in flames, ignored a request from Bier that it label the content as AI.

The post remained online, racking up more than two million views.

Last month, a report from the Tech Transparency Project said X appeared to be profiting from more than two dozen premium accounts belonging to Iranian government officials and state-controlled news outlets pushing propaganda, potentially in violation of U.S. sanctions.

X subsequently removed blue checkmarks for some of them, the report said.

Even if X’s demonetisation policy were strictly enforced, a vast number of X users peddling AI content are not part of the revenue sharing programme, researchers say.

Those users are still subject to being fact-checked through Community Notes, a system whose effectiveness has been repeatedly questioned by researchers.

Last year, a study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas found more than 90 percent of X’s Community Notes are never published, highlighting major limits.

“X’s policy is a reasonable countermeasure to viral disinformation about the war. In principle, this policy reduces the incentive structure for those spreading disinformation,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech.

“The devil will be in the implementing detail: Metadata on AI content can be removed and Community Notes are relatively rare,” he said.

“It is unlikely that X will be able to guarantee both high precision and high recall for this policy.”

Published – March 16, 2026 09:29 am IST