Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang says AI is moving very close to driving tangible economic gains, as Big Tech makes a push for the next leg of the infrastructure buildout.
In a new interview with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at Davos, Huang says the AI buildout is a five-layer cake that does not end in models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
According to Huang, energy sits at the bottom of the cake, followed by chips and computing, cloud services, AI models and the application layer on top. The Nvidia executive highlights that the application layer is where the true potential of AI is unleashed.
“But the most important layer, and this is the layer that’s happening right now. The reason why last year was an incredible year, frankly, for AI is that the AI models made so much progress that the layer above it, which is ultimately the layer that we all need to succeed, the application layer… And so this application layer could be in financial services, it could be in health care or it could be in manufacturing. This layer on top ultimately is where the economic benefit will happen.”
The application layer is the top part of the AI tech stack, where models are integrated into real-world software to drive business results and productivity gains. AI-powered diagnostics, fraud detection and predictive maintenance software belong to this stack.
But Huang says the application layer still needs a massive amount of infrastructure to support the four other layers operating underneath.
“There are trillions of dollars of infrastructure that needs to be built out, and it’s sensible. It’s sensible because all of these contexts have to be processed so that the AI, so that the models can generate the intelligence necessary to power the applications that ultimately sit on top.”
Recently, business and tech insight firm Gartner estimated that $1.366 trillion will be spent this year to fund AI infrastructure, with investments expected to jump to about $1.75 trillion next year.
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