We're about to find out if Jensen Huang can get investors to snap out of their AI panic

• Investors are panicking that AI might take longer to yield returns.
• Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, is ready to address their concerns.
• He's set to speak at a Goldman Sachs event as investors have been selling off Nvidia shares.

Jensen Huang faces a monumental task as he takes center stage at a Goldman Sachs event on Wednesday: getting AI investors to stop panicking.

The billionaire Nvidia CEO is set to speak at the investment bank's Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco at a time when investors are feeling increasingly uncertain about the hype surrounding AI .

"He does have to step up here, I think," Chris Beauchamp, the chief market analyst at the financial-services firm IG, told Business Insider ahead of Huang's appearance, scheduled for 7:20 a.m. local time.

Nvidia has enjoyed relentless growth since the start of the generative-AI boom, sparked by the release of ChatGPT almost two years ago.

As companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI lined up to buy its chips — known as GPUs — needed to build powerful AI models, Nvidia experienced nearly 800% growth in market capitalization from January 2023 to this June, when it reached over $3 trillion .

The company this year has also been a huge driver of the S&P 500, which has climbed by almost 16% since January.

However, signs suggest investors are getting pretty angsty over the future of Nvidia and AI more broadly. The latest indication came after Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, reported earnings at the end of August.

The markets are in a panic over AI

Though the chip giant reported a record $30 billion in revenue in its latest quarter — up 122% year over year — its valuation fell by almost $200 billion after Huang's earnings call with investors.

Days later, on September 3, the company lost $279 billion in market value, the biggest one-day decline experienced by a US company ever . Given the record revenue results, it's worth asking why.

First, Nvidia's 122% year-on-year revenue growth in the latest quarter was smaller than the 262% growth it recorded in the previous quarter. It got investors wondering whether growth might be slowing down.

Beauchamp noted that one of the worries among investors was that Nvidia "can't sustain momentum or meet demand."

Questions about momentum have grown as Nvidia's small base of Big Tech customers, such as Google and Microsoft, spent the summer telling the market not to expect returns anytime soon from their massive capital expenditure on expensive AI hardware and infrastructure.

Analysts at the investment bank Bernstein earlier this year estimated that capital expenditure on AI, including spending on GPUs from Nvidia, could exceed $1 trillion in the next five years .

The concerns about returns have created a more anxious sentiment in the market, with investors questioning whether they should be as willing to buy into the hype as they once were. "That might change again, but for the moment, people are fairly skeptical," Beauchamp said.

On the question of whether Nvidia can meet demand, concerns have risen over delays in the rollout of the company's latest Blackwell GPU.

As my colleague Emma Cosgrove wrote in August , the industry research firm SemiAnalysis has said the processor, which was announced in March, has faced issues in "reaching high production volume."

As Huang takes the stage on Wednesday, investors will want details about Blackwell's status. Alvin Nguyen, a senior analyst at the research firm Forrester, isn't certain that will address fears.

"I do not believe that Jensen is able to say anything that will quell investors' nerves," he said. "Nvidia is the face of generative AI, and that means that they are getting outsized reactions from anything good and bad."

Huang's task is unenviable.