What should you expect from NVIDIA GTC 2026?

In this pre-show episode of The Private AI Lab, Johan talks with Dirk Glücker, AI platform engineer and Kubernetes specialist, about the sessions, technologies, and trends worth watching at this year’s conference.

They discuss:

• The unique culture of GTC compared to other tech conferences

• Key sessions around MLOps, distributed inference, and AI infrastructure

• What we might see in Jensen Huang’s keynote

• The evolution of AI factories and large GPU clusters

• Why networking and meet-the-expert sessions are invaluable

• Practical advice for navigating GTC (or watching remotely)

If you’re building AI platforms, running GPU infrastructure, or following the latest developments in accelerated computing, this episode is a great primer before the event.

Links mentioned:

AI Fail video from Dirk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWGefSIVIKM

All hybrid sessions in the content catalog:

https://register.nvidia.com/flow/nvidia/gtc26/ap/page/catalog?tab.catalogallsessionstab=16566177511100015Kus&search.viewingexperience=1700085746191002Cnn0

Register for NVIDIA GTC today using the following link:

https://nvda.ws/4qXGFjm

Chapters:

00:00 – Welcome to the GTC pre-show

00:40 – Meet Dirk Glücker

01:20 – AI fail of the week: robot meets mirror

04:10 – Physical AI and robotics challenges

05:20 – What GTC is like for first-time attendees

07:50 – Highlights from last year’s conference

08:10 – DGX Spark and AI factories

09:10 – Why meeting experts at GTC matters

12:20 – How to plan your GTC schedule

13:00 – MLOps sessions worth attending

14:30 – AI coding agents and development automation

16:10 – Distributed inference at scale

17:00 – Inside NVIDIA’s inference ecosystem

18:00 – AI infrastructure and platform engineering

19:30 – Multi-tenant GPU clusters

21:00 – Pixar rendering pipelines and GPUs

22:00 – Formula One and AI performance

23:00 – Watching GTC remotely

24:00 – Open source inference and sovereign AI

26:30 – Overlapping sessions and planning strategy

27:10 – Predictions for Jensen Huang’s keynote

31:00 – AI factory networking infrastructure

33:00 – Exploring the GTC expo floor

37:00 – Tips for first-time attendees

44:00 – Final thoughts before GTC