Nvidia CEO Huang on New Chips, AI, Musk, Meeting Trump

Jensen won CEO of NVIDIA, fresh off his keynote last night on stage. Great to see you. Welcome to Las Vegas.

Happy New Year. Familiar territory. Congratulations on your new baby.

Thank you very much. A lot's changed since we last spoke, actually. But it's the broad spectrum of what you announced last night.

New graphics cards, new chips, actually, technically in the automotive space, products and services on the software side. Which is the single most important for Nvidia's future. They're all important.

You know, it's hard. It's single. It's hard.

It's hard. It's hard to pick your favorites. You know, we announced three chips.

We announced a brand new A. I. , a World Foundation model, and first of its kind.

And we announced our work in three areas in robotics. Right. And they're all important.

And, you know, the the thing, of course, we announced a brand new Blackwell RTX and has a new AI technology called neural negotiators. And we're combining artificial intelligence and and classical compute. Let's go to RTX, the new RTX.

Yeah. We've become so accustomed to your story being dominant in a market for high performance CPU's server racks data centers. This is going back to your roots.

It's in the desktop context. There's one right there later in the year laptop. But for a target base that is developers and nerdy hardcore gamers.

What's the future of that business for you? I computer graphics is going to be here forever. Forever.

And what we've done is we've fused artificial intelligence and computer graphics together, and the images that we're generating today wouldn't be possible if not for the fact that we're using computer graphics to create beautiful pixels and then use artificial intelligence to amplify that capability. For example, you know, out of four frames I was talking about yesterday, 33 million pixels to sell in 4K. Now, out of that 33 million pixels, 2 million pixels were computed.

The other 31 million pixels were generated by AI. In other words, the AI predicts what it thinks. The pixels.

That's right. Yeah. The ultimate generative A.

I. . But what was interesting for me is the focus again was away from the graphics cards of way from Blackwell to underpin nets and Cosmos.

We probably don't have time to explain in full detail Cosmos, but you call it a world Foundation model. Cosmos is for the physical world. What Chad shipped is four words and text.

That's the easiest way to think about that. Okay, so this model text input bots can generate synthetic data in multiple mediums. It understands the physical world.

So, for example, if I ask you the question, if I ask you to generate multiple features of a car driving down the road, it would understand the dynamics of the world. It would understand the object permanence and would understand understand geometry in space, and it would create a driving scenario for the car that is plausible. And so and you open sourced it.

So I don't really think about it as a product or a go to market. It's more about what Cosmos enables. Is that how we should think about it?

Yeah, Well, the autonomous vehicle industry and the robotics industry is really important to us and we offer three computers for them. We offer it, of course, the training computer through through TJX, the robotics computer that's inside the car or inside of Roman. And now we have this new computer called Omniverse with Cosmos that is the digital twin or the playground where these robots can learn how to be robots.

And so if we could accelerate the development of artificial intelligence for Avs and for robotics, it brings in a lot of business for us. Of course, there's an academic point of tension here. If I may, Elon Musk is a customer of yours and Tesla.

The theory or practice is based on real world data gathered through vision. Yeah. Does the synthetic data underpinning of Cosmos kind of contradict that?

It doesn't replace. It augments. And so you're going to you should collect as much world data as you can.

Of course, collecting world data is very expensive and Elon has a great advantage because, number one, he has his own factory for his cars, is fantastic, has a lot of video gear in it. His AVI algorithms is incredible. It's the best in the world and and he has a very large fleet of cars on the road that allows him to collect a lot of data.

And so so I think he has just a phenomenal position and he's been working on this for a long time. And so he's he's going to be in a great position to to take advantage of it. Well, may I ask you, at this juncture, he's clearly influential in this upcoming administration, but he also positions Tesla as a leading air and robotics company.

Yeah, very. How does that vote for him? Video Elon Musk's influence on President elect Trump and.

And also the incoming administration's kind of attitude towards I, I don't know, the the the the attitude towards it. I, I know Elon's attitude towards the and and he's very optimistic about the future. And obviously he's working on some of the most important areas.

He's working on foundation cognitive intelligence i i. His. Tesla is working on Thomas vehicles and optimizes for him nor robotics.

These three areas of A. I. are the three most important areas of A.

I. . And so I think I think he's working on exactly the right things.

You kind of positioned and video is positioned in the supply chain for physical A. I. robotics, autonomous driving.

Explain that a bit more, the role you see in video play. Well, we're a core technology company, and so we build the foundational computing platforms. We're also full stack.

And so we developed the necessary algorithms and necessary A. I. technologies, and then we put it and we put it out to the industry for them to adopt it and turn it into end market solutions where we're computing platform companies.

So you're on stage and you're surrounded by, I think, a dozen humanoid robots, which is nice for you. When will I be here at CES in Las Vegas and actually have there some robots right now in real terms? You must have a timeline that you see real world commercial deployment of the technology you outlined last night.

It depends on on use case. I would say first use the first use case will probably be in manufacturing. You know, there's estimates tens if not 100 million jobs that are workers that are the world is short of workers and aging population declining declining birth rates.

And and so I think the the world needs a lot more workers. Robotics is one of the best ways for us to supplement all of that and help companies recover the lost revenues on the one hand and drive productivity, which reduces inflation for the world. On the other hand.

And so I think robotics is going to be very important to that in different different areas. So you could have probably deploy to manufacturing first because they obviously need it most, which you see is a ginormous potential market addressable. It's a $50 trillion industry that wants to grow and things to grow.

Sorry to interrupt you. Jensen. It's interesting that Wall Street is struggling with this morning, among many things, is they understand investment there that drains the foundation models.

In terms of Nvidia's business model, what you outlined last night, Cosmos and then later on, on the inference side, how physical AI helps grow your business from that drives growth. Just simple as that. Yeah, as simple as that.

I think if you if you just look at simply like we have three computers and two of the computers and omniverse drives an enormous amount of data that is necessary to train the A. I. models.

Right? And so Omniverse creates the data that we then use to train A. I.

models. The training is what drives direct sales. And the more robots that are that are available, the more data we can create, the more A.

I. models we have to. We have to go train.

That's that cycle is ultimately what we're striving for. All of that drives consumption from data center growth. There is a surge in AI spending, data center growth.

Mm hmm. Some of our audience are a bit concerned about how sustainable that is. Short, medium and long term.

Well, at the at the limit, artificial intelligence is the single most important technology force of our time. And and it's really about we're at the beginning of that. And in the future, every single data center will be driven by AI and and the type of computing that we build today.

And and so if you look at the world today, we're about a year and a half into the remodeling, if you will, the modernization and the reinvention of computing. And so I think that over the next several years, you're going to see the transition from the old way of doing computing, general purpose computing. This is a new way of doing computing, artificial intelligence and accelerated computing.

And so we have a lot of growth to go to. Let's go back to your and Nvidia's roots, and therein lies the complication behind the story Accelerated computing. You spent four years redefining the computer for me, but then we get RTX Blackwell single.

BLACKWELL In that form factor, the target audience is hardcore gamers, but also developers. And I wondered if you could give me any early examples or evidence of how you see the gaming industry adopting your technology. Well, A.

I. is going to re reinvigorate the video game industry. On the one hand, for developers, it's going to reduce the cost of creating the content.

On the other hand, all of the characters that are in the games are going to be smart characters in the future. So every time you interact with them, they're going to be interacting with you in a much more intelligent way. And so the games are going to be more interesting, the characters are going to be more interesting, the content development costs is going to decline, and that's going to be really great for the industry.

And so I think the future is really bright for for video games and in these virtual worlds. And artificial intelligence is going to really. Project.

Digits. May I pick it up? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

$3,000. Yeah. Digits?

Yeah. A supercomputer. Yeah, exactly.

How do you imagine you're just sitting there just like that? You're working on your PC? Well, why would I need one of these?

Probably not me. But how big is the addressable market for for this? What is the addressable market?

There's 30 million software developers there. Probably something along the lines of 10 million designers around the world. Probably another 20 million creative artists.

Hard to say exactly how many students I'm going to guess. Probably a couple of hundred million students around the world. Everybody is going to have to at it.

Everybody's going to have to to what they can afford computers. And so here's if they can afford computers and they would like to have a companion that helps them, do I? This is the way to do it.

Can I just clarify something? I think you said on stage Mac OS Linux and Windows, But no, no education, said Jocelyn. No, no.

Whatever computer you use, you're literally enjoying how it's going to be used. It's sitting right there and you're just connect to it wirelessly like it's your personal cloud. I promised the audience I'd clarify that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're running short on time. President elect Trump has been speaking during the course of my conversation.

How imperative is it that you go tomorrow? I'll go and meet with him. If Nvidia is America's leading air company.

And will you? I'd be delighted to go see him. Have you been invited?

Not yet, but I would be delighted to go see him and and congratulate him and and do everything we can to help this administration succeed. A lot of what you outlined on stage last night in the realm of fiscal I you know, I saw xpeng, for example, in the autonomous driving context that's happening in China, Like they are doing a lot on robotics. So I'm going to ask you about tariffs.

You know, it's likely this coming administration will be as restrictive on technology exports and tariffs will be a function. How have you prepared for that? Jensen?

Well, whatever whatever the administration ultimately decides, we'll give them as much insight as we can from our perspective. And I'm sure that the administration will make the right moves that's in the best interest of our country. 2025.

I kind of started the conversation by saying a lot has changed since we last spoke in the summer. You said that the age of general robotics is just around the corner. Is 2025 the year of general robotics, or is that a little premature to your mind?

The development is going going gangbusters, as you can see, all the different robots that are going to be around here and the enabling technology necessary for general robotics is coming together. All the pieces are coming together. The industry still has a lot of engineering to do.

If you if you look long term, you know, pick your horizon in ten or 20 years, the number of robots that's going to be on Earth is going to be measured in probably tens, if not hundreds and potentially billions of robots. And so those those days are clearly coming. Is it going to happen in the next couple of years or the next five years?

Hard to say, But the development of robotics is going to be all over the world now. And we're seeing startup companies, large companies, industrial companies, consumer electronics companies all getting involved in the future of robotics. And our offering to the industry is a three computer system.

And so whether they're developing the robot training, the robot, we have systems for them and GE X clouds for them. If they're simulating the robots, we have omniverse for them. And if they want to deploy that when they're ready to deploy the robots, we have, you know, little or little, little, little computers that basically is the computer brain of the robot that they can put inside a robot.

And so we'll work with the industry across the board from the development of the world blind to the deployment of the robot. And we have computer systems for them, algorithms for them, for them, and we'll partner with the industry to make this future happen very, very quick. Which line of business grows fastest this year?

Datacenter, gaming or other, they're all going to grow fast. I think gaming is continuing to grow. Our our autonomous vehicle business is already on its way to be a $5 billion business just this year.

And so right and right run rate. And so the autonomous vehicle business is is just starting to get off the ground. And that tells you something about how we address it.

And the reason for that is we get the benefit from the beginning of the development of the AIS all the way to the deployment of the cars, because a car company needs to factories, a car factory that builds the cars and an AI factory that builds the AIS for the cars. And both of these the both of these areas, we get to participate. And so I think it's going to be a very large business.

Jensen I've made you late for your next appointment. Yeah, it's great to see you. Really grateful for your time.

It's good to see you. While Jensen won the immediacy.