GTC Berlin 2026 Opens With Huang's Keynote, and Agents and Robots at the Top of the Agenda

NVIDIA's GTC Berlin 2026 opened on October 21 with founder and CEO Jensen Huang taking the stage at the Tempodrom. The venue, founded in a tent near the Berlin Wall in 1980 and moved several times before settling near Anhalter Bahnhof in 2001, has hosted concerts, galas and political events; this week it hosted a keynote.

According to NVIDIA's live blog, the conference runs three days with more than 100 sessions covering agentic AI, robotics, physical AI, open models and accelerated computing, with a second venue a short walk away. Journalists, analysts and partners gathered at the Tempodrom for the main address.

Putting the keynote in Berlin is itself part of the message. European AI infrastructure decisions increasingly turn on where compute sits, who operates it and which languages the models serve, and a GTC on European soil puts NVIDIA in front of the buyers making those calls.

The agenda reflects where NVIDIA wants the conversation to go. Agentic AI, robotics and physical AI sit near the top of the session list, ahead of pure training throughput. That ordering matches the company's broader argument that the unit of deployment is shifting from a model to a system that reasons, calls tools and acts.

Open models appearing on the same agenda is the other detail worth noting. For European developers, an open-weight option that can run on local infrastructure often decides whether a project stays a pilot or clears procurement, which is why model portability keeps surfacing at European AI events.

The keynote is only the opening beat. Over the remaining two days, the useful signals will come from sessions and partner announcements rather than the main stage: which European enterprises describe production deployments, whether robotics and physical AI claims come with shipped hardware, and how much of the agenda turns into documentation developers can use.