In a world As people increasingly doubt the potential of AI, you can count on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to be the last to insist that AI will be the fundamental force that changes society.
Speaking to WIRED senior editor Lauren Goode at The Big Interview event Tuesday in San Francisco, Huang called the AI trend “a reset of computing as we’ve known it for the last 60 years.” recent years”. The strength of AI is, he says, “so incredible that you can’t compete with it.” Either you are on this wave or you missed this wave.
That means, Jensen said, “people are starting to realize that AI is like the infrastructure of energy and communications — and now there’s going to be an infrastructure of digital intelligence.”
The task before Huang now is whether he can get others, particularly governments around the world, to agree on his vision.
Huang was the only person interviewed 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, just today, he met with Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister, to talk about construction.world-class AI infrastructure» together in the countryside.
It’s the final stop on Huang’s whirlwind tour this year to pitch governments on the idea that they should chart their own path to the future by building their own AI infrastructure, processing their own national data, having their own AI systems and, of course, purchasing Nvidia chips for this purpose.
The pitch seems to have worked quite well. Thailand is the new addition to a list of at least 10 countries, according to data compiled by Sherwood News, which has signed up for AI infrastructure projects with Nvidia. Huang himself said in the interview that he was in Denmark, Japan, Indonesia and India this year; the countries have all decided to build their own national AI systems, using Nvidia chips.
The success of Huang’s speech with governments around the world reflects both a fundamental recognition of the potential of AI systems and an increasingly fragmented Internet where geographic boundaries are reconstructed online. AI is the latest technological product in which the invisible flow of chips and data is impeded by nation-state borders.
One of the main tensions lies between the United States and China, two major technological powers eager to take first place in the next wave of technological change. When the two countries collide, Nvidia inevitably finds itself at the center of the storm.
Just this Monday, the Biden administration announced new restrictions that will prohibit the export of chip components and chip manufacturing technology to China. One restriction is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a memory component often used in custom AI chips. Nvidia’s H20 chips, designed to be sold to Chinese companies without violating export controls, contain HBM chips. Nvidia reportedly stopped taking Chinese orders for H20 chips in September, according to Chinese mediaanticipating restrictions this week.