Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang took centre stage at the CES trade show in Las Vegas on Monday, unveiling the fastest consumer-grade graphics cards for video gaming and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, as the company maintains its lead in the AI era.

Huang received rock-star treatment at the show. Hours before the scheduled start of his keynote, long queues formed at the Michelob Ultra Arena that can seat over 7,500 people. The speech finally began around 6:40pm local time, roughly 20 minutes late.

“Welcome to CES! Are you excited to be in Las Vegas? Do you like my jacket?” the 61-year-old Taiwan-born, US entrepreneur said, dressed in his signature leather look.

Huang unveiled a range of new products, headlined by the much-anticipated GeForce RTX 50 Series. Powered by Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, the flagship RTX 5090 graphics processing unit (GPU) packs in 92 billion transistors and delivers over 3,352 trillion AI operations per second.

CES visitors queue up for the keynote by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Las Vegas on Monday. Photo: Wency Chen

The US$1,999 GPU is the fastest and most powerful in the company’s latest chip series, performing up to twice as fast as its predecessor, the 4090, which has been banned from export to China since November 2023.