By Stephen Nellis and Max A. Cherney

SAN JOSE, California, March 16 (Reuters) - Nvidia NVDA.O CEO Jensen Huang is set to detail the company's hardware and software plans to a large crowd in San Jose, California, at the company's annual developer conference on Monday.

During a keynote address at a hockey arena with a capacity of more than 18,000, Huang is expected to lay out how the top AI chipmaker plans to adapt to a rapidly changing AI landscape.

Nvidia, the world's most valuable listed company, with a market capitalization of more than $4.3 trillion, is likely to detail a next-generation AI chip called Feynman, named after American physicist Richard Feynman, at the four-day conference. Huang is also likely to talk about data centers, Nvidia's chip programming software CUDA, digital assistants known as AI agents and physical AI such as robots.

Another focus is likely to be Groq, a chip startup from which Nvidia licensed technology for $17 billion in December. Groq specializes in fast and cheap "inference" computing work, in which an AI model takes what it has already learned and uses it to answer a question or make a prediction in real time.

After spending hundreds of billions of dollars in recent years on chips for training their AI models, companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Facebook owner Meta Platforms META.O are shifting toward serving hundreds of millions of users who are tapping those AI systems. Nvidia faces greater competition in the market for chips for inference-computing work than it does for AI-training chips, and analysts expect the company to shore up its defenses against rivals looking to regain market share they lost to Nvidia in recent years.

Despite that increased competition, some of which is coming from Nvidia's own customers designing their own chips, Nvidia remains central to the global AI ecosystem.

Nations such as Saudi Arabia are building custom AI systems for their own populations using its chips, and it is one of the only large U.S. companies that continues to release open-source AI software, a growing field of competition between the U.S. and China.

Huang's keynote is set for 11 a.m. Pacific Time (2 p.m. Eastern Time/1800 GMT).

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Max Cherney in San Jose, California; editing by Sayantani Gosh and Ethan Smith)

((stephen.nellis@thomsonreuters.com))