Downtown San Jose is currently experiencing something it hasn’t felt in decades: the electric energy of a massive tech conference that’s actually worth the chaos. Nvidia’s GTC conference kicked off this week with approximately 30,000 attendees flooding the city, and the impact has been impossible to ignore.

Walking through downtown, you’ll spot the telltale signs everywhere. Waymo taxis navigate congested streets, advertisements for cloud computing companies cover buses and billboards, and people sporting bright green conference lanyards have become the unofficial uniform of the week. The whole vibe is giving dot-com era energy, which honestly feels nostalgic for a city that’s been searching for that kind of buzz.

Adolfo Gomez, owner of Mezcal restaurant on San Fernando Street, perfectly captured the moment: “It’s the best convention since I’ve been here in San Jose. In terms of vibes, the only thing that comes close is when we had the Grand Prix”. His restaurant has been bought out by WorldWide Technology for the third consecutive year, and they’ve even expanded to neighboring Rookies to accommodate the overflow. Around 250 conference attendees gathered to watch Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech on Monday.

The conference has sprawled across the entire downtown core. Sure, the main conference floor is at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, but events are happening at the Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt Place, the Signia by Hilton, Tech Interactive, Civic Auditorium, the Montgomery Theater, and the Center for the Performing Arts. Plaza de Cesar Chavez has been transformed into GTC Park, complete with pop-up structures from companies like Hitachi, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft showing off their latest products.

Local businesses are definitely capitalizing on the momentum. The Grill on the Alley became a VIP lounge for Vast Data, Paper Plane got taken over by Computacenter, and CoreWeave House even set up an Aston Martin F1 simulator at Poppy & Claro that’s been drawing serious crowds. The San Jose Museum of Art smartly programmed “Art + Tech” free days all week, including a retro tech night on Thursday featuring Character Select, a band that specializes in video game music.

Huang, who famously started Nvidia at a San Jose Denny’s, deserves credit for keeping the conference in San Jose despite the city’s notorious shortage of downtown hotel rooms. His loyalty to the Bay Area has brought an influx of energy and economic activity that feels genuinely rare these days.

Of course, if you’re a San Jose local who just wants their favorite coffee shop back or doesn’t feel like navigating the crowds, this too shall pass. But for now, the city is experiencing something special, a reminder of what San Jose can be when the tech industry turns its spotlight this way.