NVIDIA CEO: AI Is "The Most Consequential Technology of All Time"
"This is the most consequential technology of all time, not just our time," declared NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, making an extraordinary assessment of artificial intelligence's global impact while urging immediate national engagement despite implementation challenges.
End of Miles reports that Huang made these remarks during a conversation with Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch about sovereign AI infrastructure and national strategies, highlighting that nations cannot afford to delay building their own AI capabilities.
Why nations must engage immediately
The tech executive emphasized that despite inevitable difficulties in setting up AI infrastructure, the importance of engagement outweighs concerns about implementation complexity.
"The only question is do you have to do it? If you want to be part of the future and this is the most consequential technology of all time, then you have to engage it as soon as you can," Huang insisted. "Learn it, learn along the way, and just know that it's getting easier and easier all the time." Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO
The graphics processing pioneer compared AI adoption to employee onboarding – difficult initially but systematically more enjoyable once proper systems are established. Throughout the conversation, he repeatedly urged national leaders to overcome hesitation about AI implementation.
Economic impact beyond historical parallels
Huang positioned AI in historical context, surpassing previous technological revolutions in its potential economic effects. The NVIDIA founder predicted substantial economic consequences for countries that fail to develop sovereign AI capabilities.
"It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years," he explained. "That means from an economical point of view, every nation needs to worry about it because if they don't manage to set up infrastructure and their own sovereign capacities, that means money might flow back to other countries." Huang
The tech leader drew parallels to electricity's adoption a century ago, noting that countries that didn't build their own electricity factories became dependent on neighbors – a dynamic he sees repeating with artificial intelligence.
Technology becoming easier to implement
While acknowledging current implementation challenges, the NVIDIA chief emphasized that AI technology is rapidly becoming more accessible, dismissing concerns about difficulty as increasingly irrelevant.
"You have to get it in your head that it's not as hard as you think it is. Could you imagine doing this five years ago? It's impossible. Could you imagine doing this five years from now? It'll be trivial. And so we're somewhere in that middle." The NVIDIA founder
Agentic systems have become significantly easier to develop over just the past three years, according to Huang, with all necessary tools for data curation, AI onboarding, evaluation, and guardrailing continually improving. He added that technological speed itself reduces implementation difficulty, noting how computational advances have transformed once-challenging tasks into "magical" everyday operations.
As his concluding advice to national leaders, the GPU pioneer warned against "over-admiring" AI technology to the point of non-engagement, urging instead that nations recognize its "incredible national interest" and take responsibility for developing sovereign AI capabilities.
