Nvidia CEO Says AI Drives Demand for Energy, Infrastructure and Workers

Artificial intelligence is not a bubble; it’s an opportunity that everyone should get involved in, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday (Jan. 21).

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Huang said the demand for Nvidia GPUs, measured by the spot price of renting them, continues to rise due to the number of AI companies being created and the number of other companies shifting their research and development budgets toward the technology.

“The ‘AI bubble’ comes about because the investments are large, and the investments are large because we have to build the infrastructure necessary for all of the layers of AI above it,” Huang said. “So, I think the opportunity is really quite extraordinary, and everybody ought to get involved, everybody ought to get engaged.”

The AI boom has created a need for more energy, infrastructure and trade-skilled workers, Huang said. It has also driven growing opportunities and scale of investments, making 2025 the largest investment year for AI in venture capital history around the world.

“These AI companies are building basically the application layer above, and they’re going to need infrastructure, they’re going to need our investment, to go build this future,” Huang said.

It was reported Tuesday (Jan. 20) that Nvidia invested $150 million as part of a $300 million funding round for AI inference startup Baseten , a firm that said it provides AI companies with the infrastructure they need to “take performance and reliability for granted.”

That investment is part of Nvidia’s larger push into inference that has seen the company license inference technology from Groq , commit to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI , and take stakes in dozens of smaller companies that develop technology for AI apps.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday that AI could become a bubble if the adoption of the technology does not expand beyond Big Tech and wealthier economies to a wide range of industries.

Still, Nadella said he was confident that AI would ultimately be transformative across industries.

“I’m much more confident that this is a technology that will, in fact, build on the rails of cloud and mobile, diffuse faster, and bend the productivity curve, and bring local surplus and economic growth all around the world,” Nadella said.