Name: Nvidia's Jensen Huang on an AI Bubble, Trump, and the Arms Race with China
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T10:02:46.000Z
Duration: 24 min 32 s
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Everybody's jobs will change as a result of AI.

Obviously, every single industrial revolution, some jobs are just gone, but

Everybody will have to use AI, because if you don't use AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who does.

Time has named the architects of AI as the 2025 Person of the Year.

One of those architects is Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, which is now the world's most valuable company.

Nvidia has a near monopoly on the supply of GPUs, the advanced computer chips powering the AI boom that's transforming the planet.

The industry's rapid growth has tech leaders proclaiming a new era of abundance, while skeptics warn of a looming financial bubble.

In November, I went to speak with Huang at Nvidia's Bay Area headquarters.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this week that there were elements of irrationality in the stock market around AI right now.

There's always some irrationality somewhere in the stock market.

I would say, though, the part that most people miss is that underneath the foundation of chatbots and agentic AI is a transformation of computing from general purpose to accelerated computing.

When do you then then gauge the investments incremental on top of that relative to the opportunity of generative or agentic AI AGI on top of that?

Then you'll come to the conclusion, in fact, it's very modest.

It's still significant, but it's modest relative to the overall computing market.

So you're somewhere between 4 and $5 trillion company right now.

A lot of that cash flow that you're bringing in as revenue, you're investing in other companies in the space.

Some people in the world of analysts and the stock market are saying this creates a degree of circularity.

If, for example, companies like OpenAI, which is not profitable, fails to meet the commitments that it's making to buy data centers mostly full of your chips.

Are you concerned that there is a growing structural risk related to all of those things?

Not because of this reason, for any other reason?

Well, there are other reasons that we can talk about, but not for this particular reason.

Every single transaction we do, every single purchase order that we take, we still go back to first principles and we ask ourselves, do you really have the demand for it?

Because if you don't have the demand for it, somebody else has demand for it.

The reason why we invest is several reasons.

If you look at the investments that we will likely make and have made up to now, and

you compare it to the revenues that we're generating, it's in the low single digits.

And so that kind of tells you how could low single digits create circularity?

And then very importantly, this is the last reason.

These are consequential companies, most important companies of our time, and

we have the opportunity to have a front seat, front row seat partnership with them.

We kind of also have, if you will, inside information about how successful they're doing.

And so the opportunity to invest in them.

It's going to turn out to be a great investment.

I'd love to move on to talking about the year that you've had in the world of product, politics and policy.

The year begins with Trump entering the Oval Office.

I understand that your first meeting with him ever was that month in January.

And since then you've traveled the world with him.

He's referred to you as a close friend and a great leader.

And I'm curious, having spent so much time with him up close this year, what's something that you've learned about his approach to AI and the way that he does business?

I guess maybe I'll say some things that isn't evident watching or reading about President Trump on TV or news.

First of all, he's an extraordinarily good listener.

He's almost, I think everything I've ever said to him, he's remembered.

His work ethic, he starts as early as anybody else and oftentimes we'll be talking about things late in the night and I'm kind of ready for bed and he would have gone for several more hours.

And so I've never met anybody with such incredible work ethic.

And so it just came from everything that he's done.

As far as I can tell, there is no after work spend time with doing something else.

And so these two qualities are really impressive.

And I wouldn't have guessed those two qualities, but

he's excellent listener, he's an incredible work ethic and he's super smart.

In the time that you spent in and around the Trump administration and traveling the world this year, is there an important moment that you experienced that the world doesn't know about yet, that you think it should?

The world is unaware of how deeply dependent United States and China are to each other.

The ideas that floated around about United States decoupling from China, I think is flawed.

And our dependency on each other is quite significant.

And every single time we press it, we realize what else we're dependent on each other on.

This will be the most consequential relationship in the next century.

If this is so, I think that we really ought to recognize that managing the relationship and not causing conflict is the most important thing we could do.

And so negotiations, communications, compromise, and just the continuous process of doing that is essential.

And I think the current administration has demonstrated incredible wisdom in engaging, whether it's hexth with the military, whether it's Besant and Treasury, President Trump himself, Ambassador Greer, all of them representing us, engaging deeply in conversations there.

And I think it'll demonstrate that a century from now that impactful change versus isolation and avoidance.

I think the second thing that I would say that the world didn't realize is how deeply dependent we are in the AI industry on the brilliant students and the brilliant scientists of China.

50% of the world's AI researchers are from China.

Their companies in China wants China to win.

And I think the Chinese want China to win.

We want America to win and we can have a healthy competition while we compete, compete fairly and collaborate at the same time.

But I think the taking it emotionally too far from that results in consequences in relationships that are just harder to manage.

You've been still unable to ship, at the beginning of the administration, your H20 chip to China and had argued successfully ultimately to the Trump administration for them to remove that export control.

However, shortly after that, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the goal of American chip policy in that regard was to get China addicted to US Chips.

And after that, China turned around and said, actually, no, we don't want the H20.

And since then, you've publicly declared that you have no China revenue anymore.

What was your response to Larnik's comments there?

So first of all, it's really important to understand what AI is.

What AI is, is a full stack of reinvention of every single layer of the technology stack.

That's the reason why we're talking about energy all the time.

When President Trump came into office and he was pro energy growth, if it wasn't because of his posture on energy growth.

The United States would have been in a very bad way.

We would have had no energy, no incremental energy necessary to grow this incredibly important industry.

So his growth posture, his energy growth policy is incredibly helpful.

But we have to win every other layer as well.