Would there be an AI revolution if there were no Nvidia?
That's what I found myself thinking as I listened to CEO Jensen Huang during the company's earnings call yesterday after it reported a blowout quarter. Delivered in a just-the-facts tone even if it was peppered with words such as "extraordinary," Huang made it clear that if you turn left or right, look up, down or under, you're likely to find Nvidia in whatever part of the transformation you're exploring.
There's no doubt that we still don't know how this all will play out. It is, of course, in Huang's interest to emphasize his company's role in the AI build-out. Nvidia also has a lot on the line through its role as the de facto banker/backer of many pieces of the revolution.
But even here, Huang expressed the kind of confidence that the market has appeared to be searching for, as some investors fretted over the gargantuan amounts of capital being bet to build the necessary compute. (Its stock was up nearly 5% in after-hours trading.)
Investing in companies including Anthropic and OpenAI is a "once in a generation opportunity," he said. "I think the only regret that I have is that I didn't invest more and sooner. And two of the companies will likely go public soon, and others will follow, and these will be some of the most consequential technology companies in history."
Not only that, but they're also Nvidia customers. "I have 100% confidence that you know through quite a long period of time they're going to be utilizing Nvidia compute for a lot of their computing," he added.
Huang noted more than once that capacity, not demand, is constraining Nvidia's growth-it projected 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028. What if there are no capacity constraints, he was asked.
"The unconstrained, you know, is significant, and so we're just going to have to go work hard to get more capacity." Thus its involvement in the AI supply chain that includes data centers.
The open versus closed AI models debate? Nvidia wins with both, he said.
"The world will need both closed models and open models, and both closed models and open models are skyrocketing in use," he said. "Most, I would say, nearly all open models run on Nvidia, and the reason for that is because Nvidia's footprint around the world is the highest."
The so-called frontier models such as Anthropic and OpenAI? "I'm fairly certain we're the only platform that runs every frontier model."
Erle Norton Managing Editor, CEO Brief
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