in a world As people increasingly doubt the potential of AI, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, can be counted on as the latest to tout how AI will be the fundamental force changing society.
Speaking with WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode at The Big Interview event on Tuesday in San Francisco, Huang called the AI trend “a reboot of computing as we’ve known it for the past 60 years.” The strength of AI is, he said, “so incredible that it’s not like you can compete against it. You’re either on this wave or you missed that wave.”
That means, Jensen said, “people are starting to realize that AI is like energy and communications infrastructure, and now there will be a digital intelligence infrastructure.”
The task for Huang now, however, is to get others, especially governments around the world, to agree on 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, the prime minister of Thailand, to talk about construction.”world-class AI infrastructure“In the country together.
It’s the last stop on Huang’s whirlwind tour this year to pitch governments on the idea that they should forge their individual paths to the future by building their own AI infrastructure, processing their own national data, having their own AI systems, and, obviously, buying Nvidia Chips for that purpose.
The launch seems to have gone quite well. Thailand is the new addition to a list of at least 10 countries, According to data collected by Sherwood News, they have signed up for AI infrastructure projects with Nvidia. Huang himself said during the interview that he was in Denmark, Japan, Indonesia and India this year; All countries decided to build their own national artificial intelligence systems, using Nvidia chips.
The success of Huang’s speech to global governments reflects both a fundamental recognition of the potential of artificial intelligence systems and an increasingly fragmented Internet where geographic borders are being rebuilt online. AI is the latest technological product in which the invisible flow of chips and data is obstructed by the borders of nation-states.
One of the main tensions lies between the United States and China, two leading technological powers that are 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 technologies to China. One of the constraints is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a memory component often used in custom AI chips. Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are designed to be sold to Chinese companies without violating export controls, contain HBM chips. Nvidia reportedly stopped accepting Chinese orders for H20 chips starting in September. according to Chinese media reportsin anticipation of this week’s restrictions.