Forget the marketing for a second and read what NVIDIA had to tell the SEC. Its FY2026 annual report describes accelerated computing for workloads "such as artificial intelligence, or AI, model training and inference, data analytics, scientific computing, robotics, and 3D graphics." Two of those words — training and inference — are the whole game, and the filing lists them separately on purpose.
The way this actually works: training is construction. You show a model enormous amounts of data and repeatedly nudge its internal parameters until its outputs are good. It is intermittent and brutally compute-hungry — you do it to build a model, not every time you use one. The sec.gov filing (surfaced via EdgarBeast) groups it with the other heavy scientific jobs because, mechanically, that is what it is.
Inference is the opposite shape. It is running the trained model forward to produce one answer — a sentence, an image, a classification. Each act is cheap relative to training, but it happens continuously and scales with how many people use the product. Over a model's life, inference is the cost that never stops.
Why does the distinction matter to a non-specialist? Because the AI-spend debate hinges on it. A company can justify a big one-time training bill if the resulting model earns its keep in inference. When you hear arguments about whether AI capex "pays off," what's really being argued is the training-to-inference ratio over a model's lifetime.
Here's the honest gloss: the 10-K lists these workloads to describe what the products address, not to promise demand for either. That separation — what's disclosed versus what's inferred — is exactly the discipline a careful reader should keep. The filing tells you the chips do training and inference; it does not tell you who keeps buying them.
If you remember one thing, make it the shape: training builds, inference serves. Everything else in the AI-hardware conversation is a footnote on those two verbs, both of which NVIDIA put in writing in its annual report and which you can read yourself in the sec.gov filing.