In a world As people increasingly doubt the potential of AI, you can bet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will be the last to rave about how AI will be the fundamental force that will change society.
Speaking to WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode at The Big Interview event on Tuesday in San Francisco, Huang called the AI trend “a reset of computing as we know it. [it] the past sixty years.” The power of AI is, he said, “so incredible that you can't compete with it. You're either on this wave or you've missed that wave.”
That means, Jensen said, “people are starting to realize that AI is like the energy and communications infrastructure — and now there's going to be a digital intelligence infrastructure.”
The task now for Huang, however, is whether he can get others, especially governments around the world, to agree on his vision.
Huang was the only interviewee at the event who called from outside the country. He was in Thailand, where Huang said he lived for five years as a child and where he met Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thailand's prime minister, today to discuss co-building a “world-class AI infrastructure” in the country.
It's the final stop on Huang's whirlwind tour this year to pitch governments on the idea that they should forge their individual path to the future by building their own AI infrastructure, processing their own national data, their own AI systems and, of course, Nvidia chips for that purpose.
The field seems to have worked quite well. Thailand is the new addition to a list of at least ten countries, according to data collected by Sherwood News, that have signed up for AI infrastructure projects with Nvidia. Huang himself said during the interview that he was in Denmark, Japan, Indonesia and India this year; the countries all decided to build their own national AI systems, using Nvidia chips.
The success of Huang's pitch to global governments reflects both a fundamental recognition of the potential of AI systems and an increasingly fragmented internet where geographic boundaries are being rebuilt online. AI is the latest technology product where the invisible flow of chips and data is hampered by national borders.
One of the biggest tensions is between the US and China, two leading technology powers eager to take the lead in the coming wave of technological change. When the two countries collide, Nvidia will inevitably find itself at the center of the storm.
Just this Monday, the Biden administration announced new restrictions that will ban the export of chip components and chip manufacturing technologies to China. One of the limitations concerns high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a memory component often used in custom AI chips. Nvidia's H20 chips, which are designed to be sold to Chinese companies without violating export controls, contain HBM chips. According to Chinese media reports, Nvidia reportedly stopped taking Chinese orders for H20 chips as early as September, ahead of the restrictions this week.
