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Can anything stop Nvidia’s Jensen Huang?
He has become the generative-AI showman of our time
Mar 20, 2024, The Economist
Jensen Huang is a man on a mission—but not so much that he does not have time to tell a good story at his own expense. Last spring, when his semiconductor company, Nvidia, was well on its way to becoming a darling of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he and his wife bought a new home in the Bay Area. Mr Huang was so busy he could not spare much time to visit it before the purchase was completed. Pity, he admitted later, sneezing heavily. It was surrounded by plants that gave him hay fever.
Mr Huang uses such self-deprecating humour often. When he took to the stage on March 18th for Nvidia’s annual developers’ conference, to be greeted by cheers, camera flashes and rock-star adulation from the 11,000 folk packed into a San Jose ice-hockey stadium, he jokingly reminded them it wasn’t a concert. Instead, he promised them a heady mix of science, algorithms, computer architecture and mathematics. Someone whooped.
In advance, Nvidia’s fans on Wall Street had dubbed it the “AI Woodstock”. It wasn’t that. The attendees were mostly middle-aged men wearing lanyards and loafers, not beads and tie-dyes. Yet as a headliner, there was a bit of Jimi Hendrix about Jensen Huang. Wearing his trademark leather jacket, he put on an exhilarating performance. He was a virtuoso at making complex stuff sound easy. In front of the media, he improvised with showmanship. And for all the polished charm, there was something intoxicating about his change-the-world ambition. If anyone is pushing “Gen AI” to the limits, with no misgivings, Mr Huang is. This raises a question: what constraints, if any, does he face?
The aim of the conference was to offer a simple answer: none. This is the start of a new industrial revolution and, according to Mr Huang, Nvidia is first in line to build the “AI factories” of the future. Demand for Nvidia’s graphics-processing units (GPUs), AI-modellers’ favourite type of processor, is so insatiable that they are in short supply. No matter. Nvidia announced the launch later this year of a new generation of superchips, named Blackwell, that are many times more powerful than its existing GPUs, promising bigger and cleverer AIs. Thanks to AI, spending on global data centres was $250bn last year, Mr Huang says, and is growing at 20% a year. His company intends to capture much of that growth. To make it more difficult for rivals to catch up, Nvidia is pricing Blackwell GPUs at $30,000-40,000 apiece, which Wall Street deems conservative.
