In a world where people are increasingly skeptical of the power of AI, you can count on Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, to be the last to suggest how AI will become a fundamental force that changes society.
Speaking with WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode at The Big Interview event Tuesday in San Francisco, Huang called the trend of AI “resetting computing as we know it [it] for the last 60 years.” The power of AI, he said, is “amazing, it’s not like you can compete with it. Either you’re on this wave, or you’ve missed that wave.”
That means, Jensen said, “people are starting to see that AI is like the infrastructure of energy and communications—and now it’s going to be the infrastructure of digital intelligence.”
Huang’s task now is whether he can get others, especially governments around the world, to agree with 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, just today, he met with Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thailand’s prime minister to talk about building a “world-class AI infrastructure” in the country together.
It’s the latest stop on Huang’s whirlwind tour this year to convince governments that they should create their own paths to the future by building their own AI infrastructure, processing their own national data, having their own AI programs, and, of course, buying. Nvidia chips for that purpose.
The platform seems to have worked very well. Thailand is a new addition to the list of at least 10 countries, according to data compiled by Sherwood News, that have signed up for AI infrastructure projects with Nvidia. Huang himself said during an interview that he was in Denmark, Japan, Indonesia, and India this year; All countries decided to build their own national AI systems using Nvidia chips.
The success of Huang’s voice in world governments reflects both a critical recognition of the power of AI systems and an increasingly disintegrating Internet where geographic boundaries are being reconstructed online. AI is the latest technological product where the invisible flow of chips and data is blocked by national borders.
One of the biggest conflicts is between the US and China, two leading technology centers that are eager to take the first place in the coming technological revolution. When these two countries collide, Nvidia inevitably finds itself at the center of the storm.
Just this Monday, the Biden administration announced new restrictions that will restrict the export of chip components and chip-making technology to China. One of the limitations is in high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the memory component commonly used in custom AI chips. Nvidia 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 early September, according to Chinese media reports, which are expecting restrictions this week.
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