Jensen Huang: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. The amount of energy they have is incredible. Isn’t that right? AI is a parallel computing problem, isn’t it? Why can’t they just put 4x, 10x, as many chips together because energy’s free? They have so much energy. They have datacenters that are sitting completely empty, fully powered. You know they have ghost cities, they have ghost datacenters too. They have so much infrastructure capacity. If they wanted to, they just gang up more chips, even if they’re 7nm. Their capacity of building chips is one of the largest in the world. The semiconductor industry knows that they monopolize mainstream chips. They have over-capacity, they have too much capacity. So the idea that China won’t be able to have AI chips is completely nonsense. Now, of course, if you ask me, would the United States be further ahead if the entire world had no compute at all? But that’s just not an outcome. That’s not a scenario that’s true. They have plenty of compute already. The amount of threshold they need for the concern you’re worried about, they’ve already reached that threshold and beyond. So I think you misunderstand that AI is a five-layer cake, and at the lowest layer is energy. When you have an abundance of energy, it makes up for chips. If you have an abundance of chips, it makes up for energy. For example, the United States is scarce on energy, which is the reason why Nvidia has to keep advancing our architecture and do this extreme co-design so that with the few chips that we ship—with the few chips, because the amount of energy is so limited—our throughput per watt is off the charts. But if your amount of watts is completely abundant, it’s free, what do you care about performance per watt for? You get plenty. You can use old chips to do. So 7nm chips are essentially Hopper. The ability for Hopper… I’ve got to tell you, today’s models are largely trained on Hopper, Hopper generation. So 7nm chips are plenty good. The abundance of energy is their advantage. But then there’s a question of whether they can actually manufacture enough chips.…

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