Bottom line ahead: Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang, the leader of a major company behind the current technology movement, said many people don’t realize how big the AI revolution is. He said there are currently more than 1.5 million AI models around the world, ranging from healthcare and drug discovery to better-known names like Elon Musk’s Grok and Sam Altman’s ChatGPT.
Details: Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has always viewed artificial intelligence as an infrastructure-scale transformation rather than a single technological breakthrough. In a fireside chat hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) with President and CEO John J. Hamre, Ph.D., Huang went on to outline his layered view of AI, emphasizing the systems, capital and breadth of applications that underpin the technology’s long-term impact.
Building on the previous discussion of energy, chips, and systems, Huang described the current AI infrastructure construction as multi-layered. The first level is simple: energy. Huang sees power construction as the most fundamental part of the entire AI revolution.
Next up is Nvidia itself: the chips. Without chips, there is no way to use the power and process the AI calculations needed to run AI models.
Huang went on to highlight the third layer, which “includes financial services because what we do requires a lot of capital.” His speech emphasized that large-scale development of artificial intelligence is not only a technical challenge, but also a financial challenge, requiring continued investment in data centers, networks and long-term computing assets.
Huang then turned to the fourth layer that receives the most public attention: the model itself. He acknowledged the importance of well-known systems, citing examples such as ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok, describing how “this is where people mainly focus when they talk about artificial intelligence.” However, he placed these systems in a broader context, noting that “these are just four of the one and a half million artificial intelligence models in the world.” This statement reframes the popular generative model as an incredibly small subset of a larger, more diverse ecosystem. This statement spreads the risk away from larger, better-known AI models and casts Nvidia as an infrastructure player in the technology revolution underway in industries around the world.
