Nvidia CEO rebuts fears of AI bubble as he lines up partners
The chipmaker expects to ship 20 million units of its latest chips
[SAN FRANCISCO] Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang announced a flurry of new partnerships and dismissed concerns about an AI bubble, saying the company’s latest chips are on track to generate half a trillion US dollars in revenue.
The Blackwell processor, Nvidia’s flagship artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator, and the newer Rubin model are fuelling an unprecedented surge of sales growth to 2026, Huang said on Tuesday (Oct 28) at a company presentation in Washington.
The event, Nvidia’s first GTC conference held in the nation’s capital, highlighted the partnerships that the company is forging across the industry. The chipmaker is teaming up with Uber Technologies, Palantir Technologies and CrowdStrike Holdings, among others, aiming to ensure its technology remains at the heart of the AI frenzy. And Nvidia unveiled a new system to connect quantum computers with its AI chips.
“We have now reached our virtuous cycle, our inflection point,” Huang told thousands of attendees at a convention hall blocks from the White House. “This is quite extraordinary.”
Huang also emphasised the ways his company is helping advance US President Donald Trump’s economic agenda for building out American manufacturing. The Nvidia chief delivered his remarks days before Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping to finalise a trade deal that would ease years of trade tensions. Previous restrictions have effectively blocked Nvidia’s prized AI chips from China.
But much of the presentation focused on the AI industry reaching a turning point. Huang’s argument: Artificial intelligence models are now powerful enough that customers are willing to pay for them, and that in turn will justify the costly build-out of computing infrastructure.
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The remarks helped ease fears of an AI investment bubble, sending shares of Nvidia up 5 per cent to a record closing high of US$201.03 on Tuesday.
“I don’t believe we are in an AI bubble,” Huang said during a Bloomberg Television interview after the presentation. “All of these different AI models we are using – we are using plenty of services and paying happily to do it.”
Nvidia expects to ship 20 million units of its latest chips. A previous generation – Hopper – only accounted for four million units in its whole lifetime, Huang said.
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The highlights of the GTC event, described as an “AI Super Bowl,” included:
- An agreement to power a fleet of 100,000 self-driving Uber vehicles with Nvidia technology. As part of the collaboration, Stellantis will be among the first automakers to deliver the robotaxis.
- A partnership with automaker Lucid Group to develop an autonomous vehicle platform.
- An Nvidia investment of US$1 billion in Nokia, the finish telecommunications company. The move helps support Nokia’s pivot from mobile networking into AI, and it sent that company’s shares soaring.
- A CrowdStrike collaboration to develop “always-on, continuously learning” AI agents for cybersecurity. Shares of CrowdStrike gained on the announcement.
- A Palantir pact that will pair Nvidia’s technology with that company’s Ontology platform. The idea is to use AI techniques to gain new insights into logistics. Lowe’s will be one of the first adopters, Nvidia said.
- A plan with Eli Lilly to build the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company. It will rely on more than 1,000 of Nvidia’s Blackwell AI accelerator chips.
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has benefited more than anyone from runaway spending on AI computing. But it still depends on a small group of customers, data centre operators such as Microsoft, Amazon.com and Alphabet’s Google, for much of its revenue. The three-day Washington event is part of a bid to serve a broader client base.
Though Nvidia remains dominant in the market for AI accelerators, the processors that help train and run AI models, its challenges are growing. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom are making inroads in the industry, and companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI is looking to develop more in-house technology. Just this week, phone-chip maker Qualcomm announced that it will take on Nvidia in AI accelerators.
AMD’s stock has more than doubled this year, signalling that investors see it in particular as a major competitor. Nvidia shares were up a less-impressive 43 per cent to Monday’s close.
Nvidia is also contending with concerns that the cost of AI infrastructure is outpacing the actual economic benefits. Huang and his peers are steadfast in their assertion that AI will revolutionise the world economy and that the computing build-out is money well spent.
The chipmaker’s pitch to a Washington audience had more patriotic flair than usual. The event frequently stressed Nvidia’s role as an American champion and the ways it was helping return manufacturing to domestic soil. Huang even nodded to Trump’s signature slogan in his sign-off by thanking the audience for “making America great again”.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has been seeking help from the White House and lawmakers to sell AI chips in China. A clampdown on exports to that country has cost Nvidia billions of US dollars in revenue.
Huang said that his projections for the Blackwell and Rubin chips did not include sales from that country.
Ahead of his keynote, Huang told attendees in an impromptu appearance that he would be seeing Trump in coming days on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Seoul. BLOOMBERG
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