The Wall Street Journal recently reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking to raise up to $7 trillion in funding to significantly increase the global supply of semiconductor chips and help solve the global chip shortage. In this regard, NVDA-US CEO Jen-Hsun Huang joked that US$7 trillion is enough to buy all GPUs.
Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai this week, Huang said the cost of developing artificial intelligence (AI) would not be as high as the amount Altman is seeking to raise.
The Nvidia CEO said that due to expected advances in computing technology, the cost of artificial intelligence infrastructure will be significantly lower than the $5 trillion to $7 trillion that Altman is reportedly trying to raise.
Huang said that it should be assumed that computers will run faster and faster, which means that the total number of computers does not actually need to be that much.
He pointed out that by 2029, the global cost of building artificial intelligence data centers will reach US$2 trillion. “The installed base of data centers is worth about $1 trillion,” Huang said. “In the next four to five years, we will have $2 trillion worth of data centers supporting software around the world.”
Jen-Hsun Huang: Learning programming languages is no longer necessary
At this meeting, Huang also told the participants that each country needs to have its own intelligence production capabilities.
Huang said sovereign artificial intelligence, which emphasizes a country’s ownership of its data and the intelligence it generates, is a huge opportunity for world leaders. “It records your culture, your social wisdom, your common sense, your history—you own your data.”
He urged leaders not to be “confused” by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has an unprecedented ability to be guided by ordinary humans, making it critical that countries embrace it and infuse it with local language and expertise.
He also said that in the information age, programming language may no longer be necessary knowledge. The purpose of AI development is also to create computing technology that does not require anyone to code, and the programming language is human: “Everyone in the world is a programmer now, which is a miracle.”
Top image credit: Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg
