Nvidia CEO Says Nations Seeking Own AI Systems Will Raise Demand

(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said countries around the world aiming to build and run their own artificial intelligence infrastructure at home will drive up demand for his company’s products.

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Nations including India, Japan, France and Canada are talking about the importance of investing in “sovereign AI capabilities,” Huang said in an interview Thursday with Bloomberg Television. “Their natural resource – data – should be refined and produced for their country. The recognition of sovereign AI capabilities is global.”

At the time of the interview, Huang was in Canada, which itself is home to a number of academic institutions that have significantly contributed to breakthroughs in the type of generative AI systems that power tools such as OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. The country now finds itself with a growing need for the supercomputers necessary to capitalize on the work of its academics, he said.

Huang, who co-founded the chip designer Nvidia, has been talking for months about the need for countries and their companies to keep precious data and the intelligence that can be extracted from it local. Such a national approach to the AI boom stands to drive an expansion of data centers that would need Nvidia’s know-how and hardware.

The world’s most valuable chipmaker is estimated to have doubled its sales in the fiscal year, driven by the AI spending of its biggest customers such as Microsoft Corp. Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. Huang now wants to expand his customer base by persuading corporations and government agencies to build their own infrastructure.

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“The vast majority of the computing market has been in the US, and to a much smaller degree, China,” he said. “For the very first time, because of generative AI computer technology, it’s going to impact literally every single country. So some of the markets will be quite large and…