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.”
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS