저자: JensenHuang · 외국인
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엔비디아 CEO 젠슨 황이 출연해 엔비디아가 AI 인프라 전 스택(CPU·GPU·네트워킹)을 유일하게 구축하는 회사라고 강조. OpenAI 직접 판매 계약과 지분 투자, xAI·CoreWeave 등 투자 확대를 설명하고, 데이터센터 전력 문제는 자체 발전(가스·향후 원전)으로 해결해야 한다고 주장. 중국과의 AI 경쟁은 칩에서 앞서나 에너지에서는 중국이 앞선다고 평가. AI 수요는 추론 모델 확산으로 지수적으로 증가 중이라고 설명. 시장 전반은 오라클 급락 등 AI주 변동성 속에서 금 4,000달러 돌파 등 강세 흐름이었음.
다듬은 글
Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Our chips are quite special. We're the only company in the world today that builds all of the chips inside an AI infrastructure. Just as bold face as his four and a half trillion dollar chip maker are the companies it has invested in.
OpenAI, xAI, CoreWeave. We've made some really terrific investments and largely my only regret is that we didn't invest more. Nvidia has a lot of cash. Yes. And you got to figure out how you want to push that back out. Jensen Huang's regrets. Are there some? And his vision for the future of intelligence.
There's just a incredibly large set of new companies that are enabled by this revolutionary technology called AI. And so these new companies are are going to be future giants and I and it would be great to be part of them, support their growth. Nvidia is on the front lines of the AI race against China.
And the man who's been CEO there more than 30 years says it's a close one. China's well ahead of us on energy. We are way ahead on chips. They're right there on infrastructure. They're right there on AI models. That big interview coming up. Plus we're on day eight of a government shutdown and gold hits a record high.
It's Wednesday, October 8th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand back, you buy in three, two, one. Cue, please. Good morning, everyone. Mike Santoli. Joe and Andrew are off today. Mike, welcome back. Yes, exciting stuff. Thank you. Yeah. A rare day of declines for the markets yesterday. It was a pullback, but not a significant
a little bit of a wobble. Um it probably felt worse than it was cuz the market has been so smoothly going higher. Um and yes, we mentioned that Oracle story gave a little bit of a gut check to some of the AI focused names. To me, more representation of how on edge people are about how far some stocks have moved as opposed to the broader thesis.
But you know, we'll talk about that. There was also some weakness in consumer areas like home builders. So, you know, a little bit of a mixed message from the market. And then you've got gold adding to its recent gains. Mike pointed out yesterday when gold crossed above 4,000 for the very first time yesterday on this program.
Uh it closed yesterday above that $4,000 level for the first time ever as well. If you've been watching from home, it's up by almost 55% for the year to date. And that has been pretty phenomenal because you know, it's acting like the safe haven. Bonds are not. It's fact Well, yes. And actually, I think that's a big part of it where bonds globally have lost their status as the reliable diversifier for a lot of people.
It is just too much government debt out there and it feels as if you want to go with scarce gold. Now though, it seems like it's also kind of a momentum trade. Yes. There's also some interesting work showing when gold has its best runs during the global trading day. And it's European market hours, Asia market hours.
So, definitely the rest of the world is trying to find reasons to to own more, top up their allocations, whether it's central banks or others. So, we'll see. It's very, very stretched to the upside technical basis on every level. So, you know, we'll see if that matters in the short term. Well, it just the the climb for gold if you look back at a longer term chart.
It went from not moving much at all to moving very rapidly once you got into COVID and once you we've seen some of the problems that have advanced since then. Um but this move this year is pretty phenomenal. It hasn't moved like that since the 1970s. No, there's been this real steep acceleration in the price.
And the other the other piece of it is it's happening while risk assets are very elevated as well, right? So, we do have this sort of almost that the globe is saying we'll take a barbell approach. That's going to be our diversifier, but we want to invest in expensive innovative companies on the other side.
Yeah. Back in Washington, federal workers furloughed in the ongoing government shutdown could be at risk of permanently missing paychecks. Emily Wilkins joins us right now. She's got the latest on that front. And Emily, what day are we now in the shutdown? We're at day eight, Becky. And and it it's understandable.
It kind of feels like Groundhog Day a bit around here. But look, at this point the White House has been ramping up pressure and Democrats though have so far been immune. And the White House, as you mentioned, they've taken threats to drastic steps during the shutdown. The Trump administration did say yesterday that they are considering not paying furloughed federal employees.
Something that of course could deepen the economic impact of the shutdown. And then again, yesterday Trump said again that there would be massive federal layoffs. I'll be able to tell you that in four or five days if this keeps going on. If this If this keeps going on, it'll be substantial. And a lot of those jobs will never come back.
Congressional Republicans, including Republican leaders, said they personally do not want to see furloughed workers go without pay. And you actually even saw some Republicans like Senator John Kennedy say that workers will get their back pay once the shutdown is over. We've always paid back pay to the military and federal workers.
And Congress has already always appropriated the money. And we will this time. The Senate is going to vote again today to keep the government funded. We expect that vote early this afternoon. Of course, in previous votes we have seen three Democrats and independents cross over to vote with Republicans.
I think the big question today is if we're going to see any more or any fewer join Republicans this time around or if we're still going to be stuck in the stalemate that we've been at for for more than a week now. Guys? You know what surprised me yesterday, Emily, was the idea that Angus King is now thinking about changing his vote and voting with the Democrats again on this.
That would be, you know, pushing us a little further apart than we had thought. The idea to this point had been that maybe some Democrats would feel some of this pressure and peel off. But what do you think is really happening on that front? Is this a situation where there is pressure that's building on some of these situations or not?
And I know the Virginia race is being watched very closely for the impact there because of the number of of government jobs in in that state. Oh, absolutely, Becky. And and I think this is what you're seeing with the White House right now. Talking about these layoffs, talking about not paying federal workers.
It's all stuff that is meant to put additional pressure on Democrats. At this point they seem to be resisting. And I think part of that is because when you do talk with Republicans and Democrats about what Democrats want to see, an extension of these Affordable Care Act tax credits, you do see some movement on that.
I mean, the other day Trump coming out saying that he will work with Democrats in the halls of Congress. Almost every Republican who I talk to now seems to say, "Hey, yes. We are open to finding a work around on this." Marjorie Taylor Greene coming out and saying that they need to be extended in some way, shape, or form.
You have seen a bit of a shift in how Republicans are talking about these tax credits, talking about healthcare. You're just now at this point where Republicans say, "We're not going to go any further until the government is reopened." And Democrats saying, "Well, we're not sure we trust that you will come to the negotiating table if we give you the votes to reopen the government." So, I think what you're seeing right now is a lot of side conversations, a lot of you know, bipartisan groups of senators trying to see what the way out of this is.
And when we spoke with Angus King about whether or not he'll switch a vote, he's basically saying that he needs a little bit more from Republicans in terms of commitments for the Affordable Care Act tax credits. Democrats have really decided this is going to be a a good issue for them, a potentially winning issue for them.
But of course, we'll see how these dynamics change especially as we get into next week and October 15th is now circled on everyone's calendar as the day that members of the military are going to start missing pay and missing a paycheck if this shutdown continues until that then. Emily, thank you. Emily Wilkins.
We're watching Oracle. Shares fell about 2 and 1/2% yesterday on a report from The Information that raised questions about the company's plans to buy billions of dollars worth of AI chips and rent them as a cloud provider to clients like OpenAI. Oracle was down close to 7% at one point following that report.
The Information report said Oracle had 14% gross margins on $900 million in sales in its Nvidia cloud business in the three months ending in August. Now, that's much lower than Oracle's overall gross margin of around 70%. The report said Oracle's recent transformation into a key cloud and AI company could run into profitability challenges because of the expense of Nvidia's chips and Oracle's aggressive pricing on its chip rentals.
We will get into all of this when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joins us here live. You know, he he spoke with Jim Cramer's Investment Club yesterday. And this was something that Jim brought up with him. Asked him about this, said what what what should we make of this? And Jensen basically said, "Look, Oracle's going to make a lot of money on this down the road." I think some of the older chips that they service, they may make some money on, too.
But that is a steep differential Yeah. profit margins that they're seeing with this deal where they're renting those chips versus what Oracle normally would be seeing. There's no doubt about that. There was quickly though an assessment by the market itself, right? Down 7% and then a bid because this is kind of the way new product cycles go.
Before you scale it, before it's mature, you actually are not reaping the same kind of profitability. But there have been concerns that Oracle's model and the CoreWeaves, that those middle men may not ultimately be, you know, the the the biggest beneficiaries. But that doesn't mean it's not viable. mean it's not viable.
But then again, you have seen big runs in these stocks. Yes. You're looking at Oracle year to date, up 70%. Yes, it is down 20% off its high. So, it was this exuberant run. And it's Yeah, it depends on where you're starting from. But it's a great run. In the meantime, Dell CEO Michael Dell says that AI data center construction will eventually top out, but that moment hasn't come yet.
Joining Closing Bell Overtime yesterday, Dell said that demand for computing power is currently in his words tremendous. I'm sure at some point there'll be too many of these things built but but we don't see any signs of that. And and and look there've been periods in the past where there's like a digestion cycle but based on the demand signal we see and what we're hearing from customers we're we're watching carefully understand what's going on.
It seems like the demand is is very solid. Dell's shares rose about 3% yesterday after the company increased its long-term revenue and profit growth outlook. Dell's AI servers are powered by Nvidia's Blackwell ultra chips. The company sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and Elon Musk's xAI kind of showing you the interwoven nature of all of these big players.
They're all customers and competitors and at some points investors. Financial backers. Yeah, I mean it's I guess the demand and the capital needed is so vast that everybody has to pull from wherever they can and obviously everyone racing to the same point and and speaking of xAI Bloomberg reporting Musk's AI startup is increasing the size of an ongoing funding round to $20 billion with help from backers including Nvidia.
The report says part of the combo equity and debt deal involves the purchase of Nvidia AI chips to be leased to a huge xAI data center in Tennessee. Little less than 3 weeks ago Musk posted on X that xAI was not currently raising any capital and the and the 12 and a half billion as of reported debt as part of the 20 is in some special purpose vehicle.
That's another part of the story where part some of this financing is happening in debt as opposed to just equity as opposed to just coming out of the cash flow of the big cloud service providers and such and so you know again it sort of builds up the uh perceived riskiness of the whole venture. I mean I'm really excited to talk to Jensen Huang about all of these things.
Yeah. It feels like the news flow is just so fast just so rapid. Absolutely. Nvidia's front and center for everything that's happening in the AI world so they're kind of living through this firehose too if not the ones who are actually pumping the water through the firehose on some of these issues. One of the things I'd like to talk to him about that I just to get his ideas on capital allocation right?
Nvidia has a lot of cash. Yes. And you got to figure out how you want to push that back out. Do you use it for research and development to build the company? Do you give cash back to shareholders or do you find ways to make these other investments? Getting his thoughts on how he sees all of that. Based on the consensus I just ran it this morning it's supposed to produce Nvidia is supposed to produce 240 billion in free cash flow this fiscal year next fiscal.
So what do you do with that? Their CapEx needs are actually very very low. It's ironic obviously that they don't really need to do a lot there. Because they've been they've been at the forefront of the research and development right? and they have it. So yes that's a huge question. The CFO has said we'd rather just kind of accelerate the growth of the whole ecosystem as opposed to buy back a ton of stock or or you know dividends.
they cut are better than what anybody else can do. I I would argue that Nvidia's deal with Open AI is much better than AMD's deal with A They're they're coming from an advantage. They they have a better position that they can do it. They've got the cash flow and they can put it in. Yeah it'd be great to get Jensen's thoughts on that.
Well Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says his company will continue to sponsor H-1B worker visas despite a potentially large financial hit from the government. In a message to staff or seen by Business Insider Huang said Nvidia will cover all costs associated with the visas. Those are set to balloon thanks to a new executive order from President Trump.
The government will impose a new $100,000 fee on H-1B applications. In the memo to workers Huang who is himself an immigrant said his company's success wouldn't be possible without immigration. We'll dig into this and much more when Jensen Huang joins us here live. Tease will be next. Coming up today's big interview Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang how he thinks about different kinds of artificial intelligence.
Where the real value for enterprises and companies are is specialized intelligence and where the value for consumers general intelligence. His investments in Sam Altman's Open AI and Elon Musk's xAI and how the United States is stacking up to competition from China. Overall I would say we're not far ahead.
If you look at the entire stack they're way ahead on energy. I am so happy that President Trump leaned into pro-growth pro-energy growth so that an entire industry above it could grow. We'll be right back. This is Squawk Pod from CNBC today with Becky Quick and Mike Santoli. Up and Becky here. Global spending on AI is projected to reach nearly one and a half trillion dollars this year and it could top two trillion dollars in 2026.
Joining us right now is one of if not the key player that's been driving innovation in the field Jensen Huang. He is the CEO of Nvidia. It's got a market cap of four and a half trillion dollars makes it the world's most valuable company and Jensen it is a pleasure to have you here on set. So happy to be here.
Nice to see you. As happy as we are. . There are so many things that I'd like to talk to you about because it seems like every day there is this huge fire hydrant of news that's all about AI and your company's at the center of most of that news. So if you don't mind maybe we can just run through some of these headlines and you can explain what's happening from your perspective.
to. Okay. Let's start with the deal that you cut first with Open AI that you've talked a lot about that was then followed up by this deal earlier this week with AMD and Open AI. It's got a lot of people trying to figure out what the dynamics are of this industry. What do you think about it? Did you know about that deal before it was announced?
Not not really but our deal is very different than theirs. We've been working with Open AI through Azure Microsoft and OCI and CoreWeave and so through third parties for quite a long time. In fact in 2016 I delivered the world's very first AI supercomputer called DGX-1 to a startup a nonprofit startup in San Francisco and that company turned out to have been Open AI.
And so we've been working with them for quite a long time. The Open AI partnership is an addition to what we're already doing with them in the cloud. All of the cloud contracts we're going to continue to execute on all that but our partnership with them is quite unique in the sense that this is the first time we're going to sell directly to them.
Until then until now we've been largely selling we've been only selling through the clouds. And so we're going to keep doing that but the thing that's really exciting is that now by selling directly to them we could help prepare them for a day when they're self-hosted hyperscaler. And our agreement basically entails selling entire systems and infrastructure to them.
You know we're the only company in the world today that really focuses on building the entire AI infrastructure from CPUs to GPUs to networking chips and switches of all kinds and all the software stack that go along with that. And so as a we're quite a unique partner for them to be able to do this.
I guess the question becomes it's great for you that sell the directly to them but they don't have the money to buy it at this point. Is that's why the deal was structured the way it is where you're getting a stake in Open AI over time? Not they don't have the money yet and the way that that it's going to it's going to happen for every gigawatt of AI factories you're probably going to need about 50 to 60 billion dollars for the land power shell and all the computing and networking and all that you know everything that goes along with that.
And they're going to have to they're going to have to raise that money through first of all the revenues which is growing exponentially. Equity or debt and and they gave us the opportunity to invest along alongside other investors when the time comes. And so it's not something we have to do but it's something that that they're giving us the the opportunity to do and I would love to do.
You know one of the things that that uh we did we invested in Open AI early on. My only regret is that we didn't invest more. I mean this is this is the most profitable well the most valuable startup company ever and so this is a a great opportunity. You you mentioned that your deal is very different from AMD's.
AMD is in a situation where they're basically giving away a big chunk of their company to be able to be a partner with Open AI and sell them some of their goods. Is that how you read it? Yeah I I saw the deal it's it's imaginative. It's it's unique and surprising considering considering they were so excited about their next generation product.
I'm I'm surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it and so anyhow it's it's uh clever I guess. Yeah I I wondered the same thing and and Lisa Su who by the way is a distant cousin of yours right? Yeah she's terrific. She's terrific. The the way they've set this up though of giving it away they're also making some big assumptions that their chips are going to be able to compete with your chips that are coming out down the road.
Do you think that's the case? Well you know our chips are quite special and we're running really fast. We're the only company in the world today that that builds all of the chips inside an AI infrastructure and today back when we first started uh 5 years ago even an ampere chip or a hopper chip is just one chip.
Today if you want to build one of these AI supercomputers it takes a whole bunch of different types of chips that get the performance out of it because you know Moore's law the transistor itself is really slowing down and we want to create those X factors of performance increase every single year. And we're delivering these new systems every single year.
And every year it's multiple times faster than the last generation. In order for us to do that, we have to optimize the entire AI infrastructure. That supercomputer is the most complex computer the world's ever made. And we optimize across all of that. Design new chips every year. So one chip alone is not probably going to be able to deliver the type of results we do.
And but anyways, they're really good company and we take them very seriously. And we're just going to have to keep running fast. Let's talk about vendor financing because that has been something that has raised a lot of questions on Wall Street since you cut this deal with Open AI yesterday. It Bloomberg is reporting that you have a $2 billion in financing that you're going to be involved with with xAI to help them with these same stories.
But this idea of circular financing, your your customers can't afford to buy these chips yet. So you're going to help them out with money along the way. That leads some people to think back to what happened with a with companies during the big build-up like a Lucent or Nortel in the early days. Is this different and if so, how?
Well, first of all, xAI, I'm super excited about the financing opportunity that they're doing. You know, if the only the only regret I have about xAI, we're an investor already. The the only regret I have is I didn't give him more money. You know, almost everything that Elon's part of, you really want to be part of as well.
And and he gave us the opportunity to invest in xAI. I'm just delighted by that. And so it's that's not that's an investment into a really great future company. And I'm really excited about that. That's not venture venture that's not vendor financing per se. But what's going on what's going on in the world versus what happened in 2000 is just dramatically different.
You know, back then, as you recall, there were pets.com, hospitals.com, and all of the internet companies combined was what, 30, 40 billion dollars in size? If you look at the hyperscalers now, that's where the first tranche of AI infrastructure is building. If you look at the AI the the hyperscalers at about $2.5 trillion of business that's already operating today, that business, that $2.5 trillion business and the capex that goes underneath that is about call it $500 billion.
That transition from a classical CPU-based computing to now generative AI computing powered by GPUs, that transition is just starting. So we're we've got to build into half a trillion dollars worth of capacity infrastructure that's already naturally growing by itself. And we're in the beginning phases of that.
We're If you just look at Nvidia's AI infrastructure business, you know, call it a couple hundred billion dollars so far. You're a couple hundred billion dollars into a multi-trillion dollar build-out. So that's number one. The second part of it that's really unique is that we have a new generation of AI companies.
The new AI companies like Open AI and Anthropic and xAI and and companies that are that are well, you know, Thinking Machines Lab from Mira and Ilya Sutskever's SSI and Misha's company Reflection. And I mean, there's a whole bunch of amazing AI AI model builders now. This generation of AI model builders, what's happened in the last several months, a transition happened that i, they've been generating tokens, you know, these AI tokens, basically at a loss.
And the reason for that is because the early AI models weren't they were super interesting. I really captivated a lot of attention. But they weren't useful enough to pay for. The last several months has been very clear that the new technology is now reasoning. It's doing research. Before it answers a question, it goes on the web and studies other PDFs and websites.
It can now use tools, generate information for you. And it creates creates responses that are really useful. I use it every day. To the point where now the tokens are profitable. The question though is who is going to continue to pay for that build-out? Is it the big companies like Procter & Gamble?
Is it a big Is it consumers who are going to do this? I mean, my doctor showed me the AI that he's using and it's incredibly helpful. But there's still a question about whether he's going to pay for it or the company works for is going to pay for it. Well, hopefully both. I think the there's the consumer part of it.
You know, a lot of Open AI customers are consumers and they're paying for it. But the thing that's really cool is that the enterprise AI build-out that's happening now, my my favorite enterprise AI service is Cursor. Cursor is an AI coder. And every one of our engineers, 100%, is now assisted by AI coders.
And our productivity has gone up incredibly. And so you're now seeing enterprise AI companies like Cursor, Open Evidence, I love Lovable. All of these companies are some of the fastest growing companies in the world and they address enterprise. And so enterprise AI is here. I wonder how you think about Jensen, the ultimate destination where all this is actually building toward.
I don't know, there was a a post from David Connie, a Sequoia partner, this week saying, "Look, AGI is the only thing that can justify the volumes of capital spending right now." Artificial general intelligence. At the same time, many of the model builders next door are pushing out the date where that maybe is going to be achievable.
Meantime, you're talking about annual generations of chips. How fast do they depreciate? We're putting all this capital in these data centers that it's just not clear like when we get to the end. Or is it just a treadmill? We are going to have incredibly profitable and incredibly useful AIs long before AGI.
And for example, right now, Cursor AI. You know, Cursor Cursor's AI software coder is incredibly useful. All of our engineers use it. We have some 40,000 engineers. Almost every one of them are going to use it. And they're they're loving it. And so They're using it instead of something else, presumably, right?
So these are just displacing things. Yeah, they're not They're This is a brand new thing. Yeah. Remember, AI, unlike unlike previous technologies, previous technologies are tools that humans use. Excel is a tool that humans use. A web browser, it's a tool that humans use. For the very first time, we have technology that can actually use tools by itself.
And so Cursor uses, you know, Visual C++ and it and now we have Gemini agents that are able to use the browser and browse browse for for groceries or, you know, destinations or book travel for you. And and it can use travel It can use tools by itself. So So this is really quite an extraordinary thing.
This tool users, the tool industry is a few trillion dollars. Tool user industry is a hundred trillion dollars. Which is the reason why everybody's so excited about the future of technology because it could augment labor. It can increase the productivity of labor. And here at Nvidia, you know, it's increased our productivity tremendously.
You've already said you wish you could have bought more Open AI and maybe invested more in xAI at this point. That implies that you don't think that this is all redundant. Because a lot of the players, I mean, if I read what Sam Altman says and the message he tries to convey, it's as if they're sprinting to try to stay ahead of everybody else cuz they think it's not going to be room for everybody necessarily who's trying to do something similar.
I think there's general intelligence and I think there's specialized intelligence. Yeah. We love general When I hire engineers, I like them to be generally intelligent. And that's that's a great thing. But once they come to Nvidia, we make them highly specialized intelligent so that they could build things that, you know, Nvidia needs.
And so I I think the idea of specialized intelligence versus generalized intelligence will continue to happen. And where the real value for enterprises and companies are is specialized intelligence. And where the value for consumers, general intelligence. Jensen, let's talk a little bit about capital allocation and how do you see that?
Just back to those same points that you wish you had more invested in Open AI. You wish you had more invested in in these other companies that you're kind of taking stakes in like in xAI. You can do things with your money. You can choose to put it back into R&D. You probably don't need a ton with that right now.
You can choose to build a company. You can choose choose to make acquisitions. You can choose to give shareholders back big dividends. Or you can invest it yourself in other companies. And lately, what we've seen is a lot of investing in other companies. Do you have other deals like that planned in the works?
We're always looking for great startups to invest in. One of my favorite ones was CoreWeave. Right. My only regret is I didn't invest enough. And so in all of these all of these investments that we've made recently, we've made some really terrific investments. And largely, my only regret is that we didn't invest more.
Because they're really special companies and they're building they're part of our ecosystem building out the AI infrastructure for the world. And AI is several things. AI is energy. AI is chips. The models and the applications. And so you could see Nvidia and you could look at me working across that entire stack of ecosystems around the world.
And I We need more energy. We need more chips. We need better models and and more models. And we need a lot more applications. So what of your cash flow that you kick off and Mike, I knew you run the ran the numbers. What is it doing? I was just looking at the consensus like 240 billion in free cash flow this fiscal year and next is what is happening.
So that's a lot of cash that you can choose to to set to work. Do you look for other investments within the AI infrastructure? Do you look for ways to build out extra energy? Do you look for somebody in quantum computing to get to the next thing that you could buy? What what what's in your brain at this point?
All of that. Um I'm excited about enterprise AI applications. And uh if if I would have realized that the cursor team was raising money before, I would have given them all of my my money. And so, this is really terrific stuff. Um I'm excited about the work that that uh Open Evidence is doing in uh helping digital nurses and digital hos- um uh with diagnosis.
Um I'm excited about um uh the work that uh uh Figure is doing in robotics. Uh Wave is doing in self-driving cars. Waabi is doing in self-driving cars. And so, the there's just a a a an incredibly large set of new companies that are enabled by this revolutionary technology called AI. And so, these new companies are are going to be future giants.
And I and it would be great to be part of them, support their growth, um and uh uh be part of that part of that journey. There there was an analyst who was on our uh program earlier this week, maybe it was late last week, who said after the OpenAI deal, they wondered how long it would take for the antitrust authorities to come looking at Nvidia.
I didn't quite understand that, dug into it a little bit. Reuters has put out something just saying that as all these big big giants in the AI development world kind of team up and partner, it does raise questions about whether it shuts out new entrants. What's What's your response to that? What do you Um all of these deals have to be done in a way that that is fair to others, doesn't doesn't uh foreclose markets, and uh is not exclusive.
And so, the investment that we make in OpenAI, we don't make it a a requirement that they use that investment to buy Nvidia's technology. They could use it to do anything they like. And And maybe the AMD deal that was came that came just on the heels of that kind of proves that out, that it is not a a single partnership that works for some of these things.
are no no exclusivities. Um the the goal is to to advance uh the AI infrastructure, support their success, and in many of these cases, you know, to be part of that incredible journey for us. And and uh it's great returns on our money, of course, but our primary goal is just really to support them and help them grow and grow the AI ecosystem.
What um What What Again, you were surprised by the AMD deal, but you look at it very differently. Does Do you think as a comp- competitive structure here, this puts like any pressure on anything that comes through? What do you I don't think it has really anything to do with with um I it it won't affect anything that we do.
I think our primary focus, our strategy number one, is to create a platform that increases performance, or another way of thinking about it, reduces token generation cost by very significant margins every single year. Now, of course, that pace of innovation puts pressure on the entire industry, you know, all of our competitors and and so on.
But everybody benefits when we drive the cost of tokens down every single year. Between Hopper and between Blackwell and Hopper, we're going to drive down the cost of tokens 10 to 20 times. And so, that's another it Moore's law, transistors alone would have driven it down by 20%. So, instead of 20%, it's 20 times.
And we're going to do that again and again and again every single year. We could do it because we change every single chip in the data center. We change every single technology all once. And so, my my focus and the company's focus is just to keep that pace going. And when we keep that pace going, the ecosystem around us, when the token generation continues to decrease, the AIs get smarter.
And when the AIs get smarter, we can use it for more applications, and we can, you know, drive more productivity into the economy, the economy grows, you know, everything everything gets better. But when the AIs do get smarter, is that going to mark a transition away from just the hyper-intensive um physical capital building part of this, where hardware is is the entire, you know, the entire game in a sense, right?
I mean, um it's an interesting thing when I look at how the the Metas and the Microsofts uh and the Alphabets were looked at a few years ago. Oh, they're asset light. They don't have to reinvest in their businesses. They have massive free cash flow. And now it's about actually creating physical assets that are going to be productive down the road.
Do we get to a point where it's like, now we reap? No. And the reason for that is because forever, AI is going to be about thinking. And in order to think in real time, to understand the question, understand the context, maybe go do some reading and research on the internet, that thinking process requires a computer.
That's the reason why I say there's a new industry. We've created a brand new industry called AI infrastructure. And these infrastructures will be like the electricity infrastructure, the internet infrastructure, and this will be permanent infrastructure for society, every society. And so, this is this is a transform transformative time.
And the way we deliver computers in the future, the way we deliver intelligence and produce intelligence is fundamentally different. The thing that you mentioned, which is really interesting, is when you look across the stack, when I said earlier, AI is energy, it's chips, it's infrastructure, it's AI models, and it's AI application.
And in just one conversation, we've already identified that energy industry is growing, the chips industry, for example, us, we're growing, uh infrastructure, Azure, OCI, AWS, CoreWeave, Nebius, these incredible companies, they're growing, AI models, OpenAI, Anthropic, X, they're growing. And on top of that, AI applications, Cursor, Open Evidence, isn't that right?
We're literally seeing a compu- complete revolution across that entire stack and opportunities across it. And to the extent that we we have the the financial capacity to do so and to be part of this ecos- this entire stack, we're going to participate across that entire stack. Jensen, you're not only looking at technological advances and thinking about how to do that, how to build this infrastructure, you have to be thinking about risks all the time, too.
Yeah. What's at the top of your list in terms of risk assessments when you're looking at these things that pose a risk, pose a threat to the growth that you're talking about? Well, there's a lot of technology risk, and there's a lot of, you know, product design risk. There's a lot of those kind of things.
But those kind of things are are things we're good at. Yeah. You know, fundamentally, our company is good at building technology and building products. And so, we're good at those things, and we'll con- continue to be careful and thoughtful about doing those things. The things that are hard for us, that are new for us, are geopolitical risk.
Yeah. And it's out of our control, and um and uh uh the best thing that we could do is just inform inform uh uh policy makers and governments about the nature of AI, why it's different than previous technologies, uh to be accessible to them, uh to be in to be informative to them, and then help them help them shape policies that are in the best interest of the world, the best interest of the countries.
So, how far ahead of China do you think we are in terms of AI development at this point? How close Depending on which layer of the stack, but overall, I would say we're not far ahead. Um if you look at the entire stack, they're way ahead on energy. I am so happy that President Trump leaned into pro-growth, pro-energy growth, so that an an entire industry above it could grow.
If you could just imagine without President Trump's pro-energy uh policy, that entire layer above the energy would have been constrained. China's well ahead of us on energy. We are way ahead on chips. Uh they're right there on infrastructure. They're right there on AI models. Um we're we our models are better overall.
OpenAI's is better, Anthropic's is better, Gemini's, you know, better. However, their open-source models are well ahead of us. And then on the application layer, we have to be quite mindful because they're their applications are very fast-moving. Their society is very quick in adopting new technology.
Um they're underregulated at the They don't regulate heavily at the industrial level. And so, the applications in in China are advancing incredibly fast. This is an area that I'm quite concerned about. I hope that American uh uh companies and American society are going to be fast in adopting AI applications because ultimately, this industrial revolution wins at the AI application layer, at the diffusion layer.
There was an analyst just this week who said that he's anticipating China will get Nvidia's Blackwell chips by as early as next year. Do you think that's the case? If we are way ahead of them in chips, what should our strategy be to give them better chips or uh risk having them build their own chips that are better?
But if we are if we hold the advantage here, how do we as Americans think about this? That's right. This is This is it where a nuanced strategy is necessary. We have to take a step back. Um President Trump had a uh AI action plan day. And that AI action plan day, uh he was very clear, and it's a very thoughtful and very very uh uh a a America win around the world strategy.
Ultimately, he wants America to win the AI race. So, the question when you take a step back and ask yourself, what does that mean? At the chip level, um you want to have the most advanced chips. We want to make sure that United States and American allies have the most advanced uh access to the most advanced AI chips.
On the other hand, in order for AI to In order to win the AI race, you need to have all of the world's AI developers to be building on your platform. Just as we would If you're an app store, you would like all of the apps to run on your app store. If you're are operating system, you would like all of your all the world's applications to run on your operating system.
If you were a chip an American tech stack, you want all of the world's AI developers to developing on your on your American tech stack. That's true whether we're here in the United States or whether it's developers in China. But from a from a defense perspective, we don't want them having the the chips that are as great as we are because we don't want them having access to that particularly when it comes to the military.
No no government um surely Chinese government is going to be building their defense on Western technology. Nor does the Pentagon use Chinese chips to build our national security. And so they have plenty of chips themselves. Don't forget that this is a country not not without any chips. They have Huawei, they have really really sophisticated and really entrepreneurial startups uh building AI chips.
They're manufacturing lots of chips. And so the fact of the matter is their military has plenty access to their own chips. What we need to do is find a nuanced strategy that allows the United States to stay ahead but for American tech stacks to be uh used all over the world so that the world builds on the American standard.
Are we on the way to being that global standard? I mean you keep hearing you about sovereign AI and it seems as if there are these these interests in creating parallel uh kind of AI ecosystems. If we don't win around the world, someone else if we preclude other people from building uh on the American tech stack, they'll have to use some other stack.
I think uh David Sacks had a really simple KPI. He said in 5 years time if America the American tech stack is 80% of the world then we are doing a good job winning the AI race. If the United States is 20% of the world, then we've lost the AI race. Now one of the things that's really important is that developers are all over the world.
50% of the world's AI researchers are in China. China is 30% of the Ameri of of the technology industry technology market. The Chinese market is large, they've got a billion users. And so it's not a market that you could easily decide to walk away from if your ultimate goal is for America to win the AI race.
Giving up 30% of the world's market right from the get-go and then not allowing American technologies to diffuse and be proliferated around the world, we are essentially isolating American technology into America and forfeiting and conceding the rest of the world to everybody else. And I I think I think President Trump would say that that would be not a condition for America to win the AI race.
And so we have to find a nuanced strategy that allows and allows America to have the best technology, earliest technology, but also to win AI developers around the world and win AI markets around the world. I think you also want to be bringing in and working with the best talent and to that point you put out a note a memo to your employees yesterday about the H-1B visas and the new government requirement that it's going to cost $100,000 on top of it to bring someone in from China or from India or from elsewhere.
Um what what is your policy with that? What what do you think of this new step in it? I know you've said that you're going to step up and go ahead and pay those to bring people in. Immigration I'm an immigrant. Um immigration and uh And we're very glad to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. Um immigration is the foundation of the American dream.
Uh this ideal that that anyone can come to America and through hard work and some talent be able to build a better future for yourself. Um my parents came here because of the American dream and wanting us to be able to enjoy the the the opportunities in and uh uh this incredible country that that is America.
And and I think this ideal um and this this dream is a is um common around the world. Only America has a word a phrase that says the American dream. There's no other country that has something other you know some other country dream. And so so we would like to to create this opportunity for all of our employees and and um and I hope that that uh this opportunity persist for everybody else.
I do I do think that that um President Trump's H-1B policy um enables us to continue to attract the world's best talent and enable them to come to uh come to American companies. And for all of all of these uh uh foreign students who come to the United States gets an Ameri gets an incredible American degree and one of the best best educations in the world to create the conditions by which we can have them stay.
Um I think it's a first step. There are things that I would love to see that that um enhances the policy so that there there's some still some opportunities for serendipity to happen. For example, I don't think that my family would have been able to afford the $100,000 and and so the opportunity for my my family and for me to be here uh would have been would not have been possible with with this with this current policy.
And so I'm I'm hoping that there will be enhancements to it. And I think this is just a first step and President Trump is always pragmatic and you know I think that they'll be enhanced enhanced over time, but this is a a nice improvement. We mentioned just quickly $4.5 trillion market cap. Your employees created that value and are also beneficiaries beneficiaries of that value.
How do you run a business and maintain a culture when so many of your employees have done so well financially and keep them motivated and such? Yeah, half of your employees have a net worth of more than a million dollars and I think 75% or 75% are over a million. Half of them are over 25 million in net worth.
Yeah, and I'm so happy about that. I get so many emails with them you know people saying I just bought a house or I just bought my family or my parents a house or put my kids through school or and I just love that. Um the way you do that is to stay focused on on on the purpose of the company, uh the work the important work that we're doing.
Uh you know ultimately my job is to create the conditions by which amazing people could do their lives work. And as it turns out for most people who are doing their lives work the money is is a is a you know is a symptom of doing that work well. It's not the purpose of the work. And so so long as the purpose of the work remains the same uh for me for example, I've I've been working hard for a long time and and it's been a long time since I've had to work and uh but I I love the opportunity to be able to do work and uh the company's in a place now where the work that we do could be really quite consequential for the world.
Uh we've been building impactful technology that could revolutionize and transform just about every industry and every society. And so this is a a time that that not none of us um wants want to give up on. And so this is such a great great opportunity for us. Can I ask you quickly about electricity?
We've mentioned that several times. There was a Bloomberg report just in the last week or so that just said wholesale electricity prices are up by as much as 267% in areas that are new near new data centers that have been built that those costs are getting passed on to average consumers. First of all, do you think that's true?
And second of all, what do we do about it? I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure if it's true or not. Um but what we should do about it is to invest in power generation behind the meter. And President Trump has has really created the conditions by which we could go and do that. And all become power generation companies ourselves.
And so these data centers uh uh should be outfitted with with uh power generation capabilities whether it's natural gas or uh in the future several years from now uh nuclear. We should invest in just about every possible way of generating generating energy. And then uh even you know put it back onto the grid.
And so that's the future. Uh and data center self-generated power could move a lot faster than putting it on the grid. And we have to do that. We have to do we have to apply every possible form. Uh Jensen, anything you wanted to talk about that you feel like you haven't gotten the chance to talk about?
You get people asking you questions all the time. What do you not get to talk about? Well, uh we'll see. What do we What do investors most want to know from you I guess? Uh-huh. Investors, I I would say uh the thing that is uh even quite surprising this year particularly last 6 months, demand of computing has gone up substantially.
And this is what's happened. Because AI went from a simple one-shot one-shot answers to these reasoning and thinking AI, the results are so good. It but but it uses exponential amounts of computing. But the the interesting thing is because they're so good, because they're so smart and they use exponential amounts of computing we're seeing exponential demand, which makes sense because the AIs are smart enough that everybody wants to use it.
And so we now have two exponentials happening at the same time. Demand for Blackwell is really really high and uh we're trying we're working hard to get everybody online and uh you know get get AI to the next level. But but I I think we're at the beginning of a new build out, beginning of a new industrial revolution.
And um uh it's going to be exciting times. Jensen, we want to thank you very much for being with us this morning and being on set. It's really great to see you. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yes, thanks so much. Good day. And that is the pod for today. Thank you for listening. Sorkin. Big thanks to Mike Santoli for sitting in today.
You can tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6:00 Eastern or when you follow Squawk Pod wherever you like to get your podcasts. Have a great day. We'll meet you right back here tomorrow. And we are clear. Thanks, guys.
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