Jensen Huang: “GeForce is Nvidia’s greatest marketing campaign”
Nvidia's CEO sees GeForce graphics cards as a lure to its own platforms. Gamers are eventually supposed to become "proper customers, proper developers."
(Image: Andreas Wodrich / heise medien)
The opening speech by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the company's GTC 2026 trade fair clearly shows how far the company has distanced itself from its former core business of gaming. At the beginning of the presentation (after the waiting music from minute 46:00), Huang said:
“I know how many of you grew up with GeForce. GeForce is NVIDIA's greatest marketing campaign. We attract future customers starting long before you could afford to pay for it yourself. Your parents paid for you to be Nvidia customers. And every single year they paid up. Year after year after year until someday you became an amazing computer scientist and became a proper customer, a proper developer. But this is the house that GeForce made.”
According to this, only someone who can afford a graphics card themselves is a “proper customer”. The focus is clearly on customers who do not play with an Nvidia GPU, but develop with it.
“Without GeForce […] no today”
In a short video for the 25th anniversary of GeForce 3, Huang already summarized: “Without GeForce, there would be no CUDA, without CUDA, there would be no AI, without AI, there would be no today.” CUDA is Nvidia's combination of GPU architecture and programming interface, on which its own AI ecosystem is based. Huang sees tokens as a comprehensive currency for companies that enables growth.
The stepmotherly treatment of gamers was already evident with the introduction of the RTX 5000 series. Except for the GeForce RTX 5090, the newcomers are only moderately faster than their 4000 series predecessors. Nvidia further differentiates the various generations through AI functions, such as the multi-frame generation (MFG) exclusive to RTX 5000, which generates artificial images between normally rendered ones.
At GTC 2026, Nvidia introduced DLSS 5 with Neural Rendering, which anchors artificial intelligence deeper into a game. However, the game scenes shown are also criticized as AI slop because characters get an AI look.
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GeForce is now just a niche for Nvidia
From an economic perspective, Nvidia's focus on AI is understandable. In the last quarter, the company generated beyond 62 billion US dollars in revenue with AI accelerators and server hardware more than 62 billion US dollars in revenue. GeForce graphics cards only accounted for six percent of that: 3.7 billion US dollars. The gap is likely to widen further this year.
With the new ARM processor Vera, Nvidia also wants to increasingly sell pure CPU systems for data centers. Huang believes that CPUs could grow into a billion-dollar business for Nvidia. They, too, would then potentially overtake GeForce graphics cards.
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