The tens of thousands of conference attendees who surged into downtown San Jose this week provided a stark contrast to the typical daytime emptiness, and highlighted the otherwise sluggish recovery of the city’s economically vital conference and convention business.
Nvidia said Friday that 30,000 people had registered for its annual artificial intelligence-focused NVIDIA GTC event, up 5,000 from last year. It was unclear how many registrants attended, but the company said it hasn’t historically seen much drop-off. Sidewalks, restaurants, hotels and coffee shops were packed with technology industry workers draped in the bright green badge lanyards from the five-day event.
“The Nvidia conference is the greatest thing that’s happened to downtown San Jose,” said Matt Rocca, co-owner of Original Joe’s restaurant, a stone’s throw from the San Jose McEnery Convention Center where the conference took place.
“This town has been dead for six years ever since COVID,” Rocca said Wednesday. “Now we’ve got activity and we love it.”
On the last day of the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, Cassi Begnaud, a server at Original Joe’s, works at the restaurant in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Still, Rocca added, downtown San Jose’s conference business is “just not back to normal yet.”
Team San Jose and Nvidia didn’t have economic impact figures from the conference. While the number of events at the San Jose McEneny Convention Center and adjacent East Hall has been climbing since the 2021-22 fiscal year, from 38 to 58 last year, the booming attendance at Nvidia’s gathering belied a struggling recovery with a long way to go before returning to pre-COVID levels.
Nationally, convention and conference attendance remains down 5% to 10% since the pandemic, said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. San Jose’s much slower bounce-back can be attributed to technology-industry belt-tightening, and the city’s relatively high hotel prices and scattered lodgings that put the city at a disadvantage when competing against other middle-tier cities like Sacramento and Fresno, Bellisario said.
The number of attendees at conventions and conferences at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center and adjacent South Hall has been rising since fiscal year 2021-22, but slowly, and for the most recent fiscal year, barely topped half the number from 2018-19, before the pandemic hit, according to Team San Jose, the city’s visitor bureau.
In that pre-COVID year, the two facilities saw 498,683 attendees. After pandemic lockdowns, 222,769 people attended in 2021-22. The number climbed by around 6,000 the next year, then by another 11,000 the year after that. Last fiscal year — which ended in June — 269,497 people attended the convention center and South Hall: just 54% of the nearly half-million from before the pandemic.
People attend the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
With the steep drop in attendees has come a plunge in attendee spending: from $115.7 million in 2018-19, to just $70.6 million in 2024-25.
The number of events at the convention center and South Hall has been growing — from 38 in 2021-22 to 58 last year. But Bellisario said widespread economic uncertainty will likely throw some cold water on the city’s conference recovery.
“I don’t think that’ll be reflected in conference bookings,” he said, “but I think it’ll be reflected in conference attendees.”
Team San Jose CEO John LaFortune said the convention industry has changed since the pandemic, with the advent of online “virtual attendance” at conferences and conventions, and entire events switching to online only.
For San Jose in particular, conferences and conventions play a vital role in the economy, Bellisario said.
“In San Jose just because the downtown doesn’t have that jobs and economic gravity that a place like San Francisco or even Oakland has, the convention business is really important for the downtown and associated restaurants, and the hotels, and the overall tourism,” Bellisario said. “It kind of has a snowball effect that leads to more business — conventions are the piece that brings new people in, and brings the dollars in. It’s critical for the region’s growth.”
People attend the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Attendees view “Miroki,” an AI-powered social companion robot, at the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
People attend the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
People attend the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
People attend the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
A quote by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is displayed at the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
People attend the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Attendees of the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference stand in front of Original Joe’s in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Show Caption
1 of 8
People attend the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Shifts in the technology industry have been a primary obstacle to recovery of the conference and convention business in San Jose, Bellisario said.
“There’s kind of a new paradigm in tech where it’s a little bit more focused on the bottom line, and less focused on spend, spend, spend to get to more revenue,” Bellisario said.
That change has brought layoffs and smaller travel budgets, both dampening San Jose’s conference and convention recovery, Bellisario said.
“There’s a downward pressure just on overall attendance,” Bellisario said.
Meanwhile, pandemic-era habits like videoconferencing have taken root, not only facilitating the remote and hybrid work that has hollowed out downtowns Bay Area-wide, but extending to a reduced emphasis on attending conferences and conventions, he said.
“There’s a struggle to justify travel today because your manager is going to ask you, ‘Do you need to go to this? Is it required for business growth?’” Bellisario said. “There’s a little bit less momentum to get everybody together every year in one place.”
San Francisco’s conference business appears to have bounced back faster than San Jose’s, but remains well below pre-pandemic times, with hotel bookings associated with Moscone Center conferences about 67% of the numbers before COVID, Bellisario said.
People walk by restaurants in San Jose’s SoFA district on the last day of the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
People walk by restaurants in San Jose’s SoFA district on the last day of the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)Downtown nightlife has largely rebounded, with visitors typically starting to surge in around 5 p.m., according to anonymized cell phone location data provided by the San Jose Downtown Association and Placer.ai.
But while an average noontime in 2019 saw an estimated 15,000 people downtown who didn’t live or work there, as of last year, the number had risen to only a little over 11,000.
“Lumi,” an AI robot by AgiBot, dances at the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Conference and convention attendance numbers for the fiscal year to date in downtown San Jose were not available, but LaFortune said estimated visitor spending in the second half of last year at the convention center, East Hall, San Jose Civic, Montgomery Theater, California Theatre and the Center for the Performing Arts rose 16% over the same period the previous year.
Voyager Craft Coffee in downtown San Jose near San Pedro Square staffed up for the Nvidia conference and the event gave the shop a big daytime boost, manager Sofia Garcia said Thursday.
“We’re getting a lot of early morning rushes, lunch rushes, so generally busier when our lulls would be,” Garcia said. “It’s kind of non-stop.”
Conferences and conventions have become a crucial bright spot for restaurants in downtown San Jose, Rocca said.
“It’s slowly been building back, but it takes time,” Rocca said. “We want to keep businesses downtown, or pretty soon nobody’s going to want to come down here.”