NVIDIA is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, but its CEO seems to believe it’s more than just any other tech company.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has recently delivered a powerful statement that reframes the company’s identity. His remarks are a bold claim that places NVIDIA at the very foundation of a new technological era. Huang envisions NVIDIA not just as a provider of chips, but as the architect of a new “intelligence infrastructure,” akin to the transformative power of electricity and the internet.
Huang’s vision begins with a redefinition of NVIDIA’s role: “We realized that Nvidia is not a technology company only anymore. In fact, we’re an essential infrastructure company, not unlike the first Industrial Revolution, when companies like GE Westinghouse, Siemens realized that there was a new type of technology called electricity. And new infrastructure had to be built all around the world, and this infrastructure became essential part of social infrastructure. That infrastructure is now called electricity.”
He then draws a parallel to the rise of the internet: “Years later — this is during all of our generations — we realized that was a new type of infrastructure, very conceptual very hard to understand, which was called information. This information infrastructure, the first time it was described, make no sense to anybody, but we now realize is the internet.”
Huang believes we are on the cusp of yet another such revolution, driven by artificial intelligence: “Well there’s a new infrastructure now. This new infrastructure is built on top of the first two, and this new infrastructure is an infrastructure of ‘intelligence’. I know that right now when we say there’s an “intelligence infrastructure” it makes no sense, but I promise you in 10 years time you will look back and you will realize that AI has now integrated into everything. And in fact we need AI everywhere. And every region, every industry, every country, every company all needs AI. AI is now part of the infrastructure,” he says.
He concludes by describing the idea of an AI factory. “And this infrastructure, just like the internet, just like electricity, needs factories, and these factories are essentially what we build today. They’re not Data Centers of the past — these AI data centers are in fact AI factories. You apply energy to it, and it produces something incredibly valuable called tokens, to the point where companies are starting to talk about how many tokens they produced last quarter, and how many tokens they produced last month. Very soon, we’ll be talking about how many tokens we produce every hour, just as every single Factory does. And so the world has fundamentally changed.”
NVIDIA’s ascent to prominence is inextricably linked to the rise of AI. Its GPUs, initially designed for gaming, proved remarkably well-suited for the computationally intensive tasks required by machine learning. This realization sparked a revolution. Researchers and developers quickly adopted NVIDIA’s hardware, using its parallel processing capabilities to train increasingly complex AI models. The result was a series of breakthroughs in areas like image recognition, natural language processing, and robotics, fueling the current AI boom. Without NVIDIA’s powerful and adaptable hardware, the AI revolution as we know it would have been significantly delayed, if not impossible.
Huang’s claim that NVIDIA is an “essential infrastructure company” speaks to this crucial role. If AI truly becomes as ubiquitous as electricity and the internet, then the infrastructure that powers it – the chips, the systems, and the expertise that NVIDIA provides – will become just as vital. While there is competition in the chips space — Google has its in-house TPUs, while Amazon has built its Trainium chips — NVIDIA’s GPUs currently hold a lion’s share of the market. This could have far-reaching implications, and Huang’s assertion of NVIDIA being transformed from a component supplier into a foundational element of the global economy could end up being not too far from the truth.