Nvidia CEO: AI Revolution Won’t Cost $7 Trillion

Will Sam Altman’s plans for global artificial intelligence (AI) expansion really cost $7 trillion?

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia has his doubts.

Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday (Feb. 12), the head of the planet’s most valuable chipmaker said advances in computing will keep the price tag for developing artificial intelligence considerably lower.

“You can’t assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much,” said Huang, whose comments were reported by Bloomberg News.

He said he has confidence that the chip industry will lower the cost of AI, as its components are made “faster and faster and faster.”

Huang’s comments came in response to a recent Wall Street Journal report that Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, was embarking on a fundraising effort to expand the use of AI around the world.

That report quoted a source that said Altman’s plans to reduce the scarcity of AI chips used to train large language models (LLMs) could mean raising between $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

But rather than engaging in a chip arms race with more established companies, Huang’s view seemed to indicate that better, more cost-efficient chips will make huge Altman’s ambitious investment plans unnecessary.

However, the CEO also doesn’t anticipate AI spending to go down, projecting that the global cost of data centers that power AI will double over the next five years.

“We’re at the beginning of this new era,” said Huang. “There’s about a trillion dollars’ worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we’ll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world.”

Elsewhere in the AI space, PYMNTS on Monday examined the use of the technology in the healthcare space.

Among the companies focused on using AI to improve medical treatment is Artisight, which focuses on employing the technology to remove friction from the patient-caregiver relationship and create what it calls a “smart hospital.”

“When I think of a smart hospital, I think about whether the infrastructure of the hospital itself is helping to advance the care of the patient,” Artisight President Stephanie Lahr told PYMNTS. “That can be seen in making things happen faster, making things happen more effectively, or just in providing higher quality data points in order to be able to make decisions. That happens with sensors. A smart hospital really is an IoT sensor network platform within a hospital that is capturing and assimilating large amounts of data.”