Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday that every country needs to have its own artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to take advantage of the economic potential while protecting its own culture.
“You cannot allow that to be done by other people,” Huang said at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
Huang, whose firm has catapulted to a US$1.73 trillion stock market value due to its dominance of the market for high-end AI chips, said his company is “democratizing” access to AI due to swift efficiency gains in AI computing.
Photo: Reuters
“The rest of it is really up to you to take initiative, activate your industry, build the infrastructure, as fast as you can,” he said.
He said that fears about the dangers of AI are overblown, adding that other new technologies and industries such as cars and aviation have been successfully regulated.
“There are some interests to scare people about this new technology, to mystify this technology, to encourage other people to not do anything about that technology and rely on them to do it. And I think that’s a mistake,” Huang said.
Huang anticipates advances in computing over the next few years will keep the cost of developing AI well below the US$7 trillion that Sam Altman is said to be fundraising.
“You can’t assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much,” Huang told the summit.
The 60-year-old’s company makes the most sought-after AI accelerators and he’s confident the chip industry will drive down the cost of AI, as those parts are made “faster and faster and faster.”
Huang was responding to a report in the Wall Street Journal that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking to raise US$7 trillion from investors in the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates, for a semiconductor initiative to power AI projects that would rival Nvidia.
Altman and other AI developers are seeking ways to diversify their hardware options, including by exploring chipmaking ventures of their own. For Altman to have a realistic chance of making a dent in their lead, he would need to spend lavishly on research, development, facilities and expert personnel, but Huang’s view would suggest that better, more cost-efficient chips will make that unnecessary.
Still, the Nvidia CEO doesn’t see an end to the increase in AI spending anytime soon. In his remarks, Huang estimated that the global cost of data centers powering AI will double in the next five years.
“We’re at the beginning of this new era. There’s about a trillion dollars’ worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we’ll have US$2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world,” he said.
Separately, Australia is lagging international peers on the adoption of AI and other advanced technologies, according to the Productivity Commission.
We are “pretty much toward the bottom of the pack of OECD nations,” Danielle Wood, chair of the commission, said at the AFR Workforce Summit yesterday, referring to Australia’s rich-world counterparts in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“So there is a really important question, not just how does the government get the policy settings right and there’s a huge amount to be done there, but how do we shift closer to that frontier when it comes to technological adoption?” Wood said.
A government report last year predicted that Australia’s productivity growth would be 1.2 percent annually in the long term, down from 1.5 percent in the same report two years earlier. The 0.3 percentage point drop in productivity would cut estimated real GDP over the next 40 years by almost 10 percent.
Wood said she was optimistic about the overall impact on productivity from AI adoption in fields such as healthcare, education and retail and “less concerned about some of the negative workforce fallouts.”
“On the jobs piece, we have been through these kind of waves of technological changes before,” Wood said. “It may be that this time is different to history, but certainly what history, at least to date has shown is every time we get one of these waves of change, net job creation is greater than job destruction.”
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
Intel Corp has named Tasha Chuang (莊蓓瑜) to lead Intel Taiwan in a bid to reinforce relations between the company and its Taiwanese partners. The appointment of Chuang as general manager for Intel Taiwan takes effect on Thursday, the firm said in a statement yesterday. Chuang is to lead her team in Taiwan to pursue product development and sales growth in an effort to reinforce the company’s ties with its partners and clients, Intel said. Chuang was previously in charge of managing Intel’s ties with leading Taiwanese PC brand Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), which included helping Asustek strengthen its global businesses, the company
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
RSS