The AI Agent Is Taking Over The Computer

NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026 Keynote - The Business Engineer Deep Research

Over the last year and a half, I’ve argued that the best mental model for understanding where AI is headed is to see the current wave of AI agents as a transitional phase. Today, agents are learning how to use computers built for humans. But that is not the end state.

The real destination is the convergence of the agent and the computer itself. Rather than AI operating software through existing interfaces, the intelligence layer will become the interface. In that sense, agents won’t just use computers; they will effectively merge with them.

This is what makes AI a true second computing revolution. The first revolution gave us graphical interfaces that allowed humans to interact with machines. The second replaces those interfaces with intelligence, shifting computing from clicks and commands to goals and outcomes.

I’ve called this the agentic expansion cascade.

In its latest GTC, NVIDIA practically confirmed that!

NVIDIA stopped selling the fastest chip and started selling the unit of computation itself — the agent — turning a chip monopoly into a toll on every watt the world converts into tokens.

Everything below is the machinery behind that sentence, with the engineering numbers translated into what they actually mean for the money — and a deeper look at how the whole thing propagates, layer by layer, until it hits the places NVIDIA can’t control.