Nvidia CEO heralds ‘inference inflection’ as next phase of AI boom, backed by $1 trillion in orders

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday elaborated on his vision for keeping his company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom that he predicted will produce a $1 trillion backlog in orders within the next year.

Sporting his signature black leather jacket, Huang spent more than two hours sauntering across a stage in a packed arena in San Jose, California, explaining how Nvidia's processors became indispensable AI components and highlighting the products that he believes will keep the company in the catbird seat.

Huang, 63, also touched upon many of the themes that he has been trumpeting since he emerged as one of Silicon Valley's most influential voices during the past few years, including his thesis that the AI buildup remains in its infancy.

“We reinvented computing, just like the PC (personal computer) revolution and the internet revolution,” Huang proclaimed. “We are now at the beginning of a new platform change.”

To hammer home his points, Huang predicted that Nvidia will be grappling with a $1 trillion backlog in orders for its chips by the end of the year, doubling his estimate from a year ago.

Nvidia has leveraged its dominant position in the AI chip market so far to increase its annual revenue from $27 billion in 2022 to $216 billion last year — a growth rate that has translated into a $4.5 trillion market value for the Santa Clara, California, company.

But Nvidia's once-torrid stock has cooled since the company briefly became the first to surpass a $5 trillion market value last October amid worries that the the AI buzz is overblown.

“This is just a white-knuckle period for the technology industry,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.

Even after Nvidia released a quarterly report in late February that far exceeded analyst forecasts and management provided a rosy outlook, the company's stock price is still down by 6% from where it stood before those numbers came out. After Huang's disclosure about an anticipated doubling in backlogged chip orders, Nvidia's shares edged up by nearly 2% to close Monday at $183.22.

While analysts expect Nvidia's revenue to surpass $330 billion for the upcoming year, the company is facing its first serious challenges in the AI chip market as other technology powerhouses such as Google and Facebook's corporate parent Meta Platforms try to develop their own processors.

Nvidia's potential growth is being held back by security and trade barriers imposed by the U.S. that have impeded the company's ability to sell its advanced chips in China.

Huang envisions Nvidia maintaining its instrumental role in AI by continuing to feed the feverish demand for chips that power chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini and expanding its reach into the emerging market for inference processors.

Once an AI tool is trained, inference chips enable the technology to take what it has learned and produce responses — whether it be writing a document or creating an image — more efficiently than the processors that were used while the large language models were being built.

“The inference inflection has arrived,” Huang said.

To help navigate its transition into the inference field, Nvidia struck a multi-billion dollar licensing deal with market specialist Groq that included the hiring of that startup's top engineers.

“Nvidia isn't going to cede any market share to Google or Meta,” said Ives, who believes Nvidia's market value will eclipse $6 trillion during the next year or so.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks about the Vera Rubin system during an Nvidia conference focusing on artificial intelligence in San Jose, Calif., Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during an Nvidia conference focusing on artificial intelligence in San Jose, Calif., Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during an Nvidia conference focusing on artificial intelligence in San Jose, Calif., Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during an Nvidia conference focusing on artificial intelligence in San Jose, Calif., Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

GREELEY, Colo. (AP) — Thousands of workers for the world’s largest meatpacking company began a two-week strike Monday in Colorado, threatening to make already costly beef even more expensive for U.S. consumers.

As the sun rose, employees picketed outside the Swift Beef Co. plant in Greeley, one of the largest slaughterhouses in the nation that's owned by JBS USA. Walking back and forth in the morning cold, bundled in blankets, some yelled “huelga!” — Spanish for “strike." Others waved signs encouraging people to not buy from JBS.

The first walkout at a U.S. beef slaughterhouse in four decades follows accusations from union officials that the company retaliated against workers and committed other unfair labor practices. They said the company offered wage increases of less than 2% annually, which is below Colorado's inflation rate.

Union officials said 99% of the plant’s 3,800 unionized workers voted to strike. More than 2,600 showed up at the picket line by early Monday afternoon and others were expected to check in over coming days, said Claire Poundstone, an attorney for the United Food and Commercial Union Local 7.

Poundstone said the strike could be repeated if the unfair labor practices recur.

A spokesperson at JBS USA denied any labor law violations and said its offer is fair. Each side blamed the other for an impasse before the contract ended Sunday night.

“They don’t really value their workers and we’re the ones that help them get all their profit,” said Leticia Avalos, a union steward and Greeley native who has been working at the plant since 2020. She depends on the job to support her family, including a 6-month-old baby, but said she'll make sacrifices to get the company to listen.

The union said its workers perform some of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the country and deserve higher wages and better health care. It said JBS in many cases has charged workers $1,100 or more to offset the company’s expenses for personal protective equipment.

Smoke rose from parts of the plant Monday, but it was unclear if it was fully operating. JBS spokesperson Nikki Richardson said “many team members” reported to work but did not provide a precise number.

“Our team members want stability, they want to support their families, and they deserved the opportunity to vote on the company’s historic offer — an opportunity the union leadership has denied them,” Richardson wrote in an email.

Richardson said any employee who didn’t strike would have work and be paid. The company also has said it would move production as needed to other JBS facilities.

The strike comes at a 75-year low in U.S. cattle numbers, with a Jan. 1 inventory of 86.2 million animals — down 1% from the prior year. The decline has been driven in part by drought and low prices offered to ranchers. Meanwhile, beef prices have soared to record levels.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Brazil, a major beef exporter, have also curbed imports. Pressed to act on “affordability” issues after Republican losses last November, Trump accused foreign-owned companies of driving up U.S. beef prices and asked the Department of Justice to investigate.

The price for 100% ground chuck beef more than doubled over the past two decades from $2.55 to $6.07 per pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The increase has added to economic anxiety in the U.S. The Trump administration has promoted a trade deal with Argentina in efforts to lower prices for food, including beef.

The Greeley plant has about 6% of the total U.S. beef slaughterhouse capacity, said Abby Greiman, a livestock market adviser for industry consultant Ever.Ag.

Most ranchers can still get cattle to market because the national herd is smaller, and that could give JBS some leverage in negotiations, since other slaughterhouses can absorb the Greeley plant's work, Greiman said.

Yet an extended dispute with the Greeley workers could disrupt the industry, particularly in Colorado and neighboring states, said Jennifer Martin at Colorado State University’s animal sciences department.

“The feedlots, the people who have the cattle right now -- the longer they sit kind of in a holding pattern, the more expensive they become to feed,” said Martin. “For consumers, it means that prices will likely go up."

The strike follows the January closure of a meatpacking plant in Lexington, Nebraska, which was expected to ripple through the local economy and community. Tyson Foods cited the smaller herd and millions of dollars in expected losses this year for the closure.

JBS has a market capitalization of $17 billion on the New York Stock Exchange after being approved for trading last May, despite environmental opposition and a federal probe that led to its guilty plea in October to bribing Brazilian officials for the financing it used for its U.S. expansion.

At the Greeley plant, the company tried to intimidate workers to quit the union in one-on-one meetings, union general counsel Matt Shechter said.

It’s the first strike at a U.S. slaughterhouse since workers walked out at a Hormel plant in Minnesota in 1985, according to Martin and Kim Cordova, president of the union in Greeley. That strike lasted more than a year and included violent confrontations between police and protesters, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.

JBS is the top employer in Greeley, a city 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Denver with a population of about 114,000 people.

“It’s a huge impact in the community for us to be striking,” said union steward Avalos. “I know a lot of us are worried, and hope that nothing goes even more south.”

Brown reported from Billings, Montana, and Lee reported from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Associated Press journalists Colleen Slevin in Denver and Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed.

Meatpacking workers strike at Colorado's JBS-owned Swift Beef company Monday, March, 16, 2026, in Greeley, Colo. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

Anthony Martinez tells fellow meatpacking workers on strike that they can take a break whenever they need to Monday, March 16, 2026, in Greeley, Colo. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

Meatpacking workers strike at Colorado's JBS-owned Swift Beef company Monday, March 16, 2026, in Greeley, Colo. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

Meatpacking workers strike at Colorado's JBS-owned Swift Beef company Monday, March 16, 2026, in Greeley, Colo. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

FILE - Employees walk in front of the entrance to the JBS meat processing plant, July 23, 2021, in Greeley, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)