Jensen Huang's Latest Interview: The Chip Industry Needs to Expand 5 to 10 Times More, Chinese Models Are Good for Everyone

Compiled & Translated by: Odaily TechFlow

Program: Axios Behind the Curtain

Guest: Jensen Huang, Co-founder & CEO of NVIDIA

Duration: 70 minutes

Recording Location: NVIDIA Factory in Fort Worth, Texas

Conflict of Interest Statement: Jensen Huang is the CEO and Co-founder of NVIDIA, holding approximately 3.5% of the company's shares, with a personal net worth of about $181 billion. The content of this episode covers topics such as AI industry expansion, chip demand, and Chinese government regulation, which are directly related to his personal financial interests. His stance clearly favors promoting AI industry expansion with less regulation.

Summary

The CEO of the world's most valuable company, sitting in his newly built Texas factory, weighs in on nearly every hot-button controversy in the AI industry. Jensen Huang is blunt: Wall Street's panic over Chinese AI models is a misunderstanding, AI doomsday theories are "complete nonsense," the chip industry needs to expand 5 to 10 times over the next decade, and a bubble is unlikely within five years. He also publicly stated that Anthropic's Mythos model should be open to everyone, and that OpenAI and Anthropic will be "the most successful IPOs in human history." Regarding President Trump, he said the president has an excellent memory, able to recall chip model names like H20, H200, Blackwell, and Rubin. His only concern is that the government might be misled by "science fiction narratives" into over-regulating.

Key Quotes

"The market misunderstood the impact of DeepSeek, and now it's misunderstanding Kimi again. Great models lead to more usage, and more usage means selling more Nvidia computers and building more data centers. The starting point is: good models lead to good applications, and good applications lead to growth."

"Saying that AI will destroy humanity is complete nonsense. Saying that AI will eliminate half of American jobs is complete nonsense. All the facts and evidence point to the opposite."

"China has more AI researchers than the rest of the world combined. China will become extraordinary in this field; it's destined to happen. Trying to stop China? That's a foolish idea and simply cannot be done."

"The semiconductor industry needs to expand 5 to 10 times. Everything is in short supply today: chips, memory, land, electricity, construction workers. This shortage is actually a good thing; it gives us time to build the infrastructure."

"OpenAI and Anthropic will be the two most successful IPOs in human history. How can a company worth a trillion dollars be just a few years old? Because AI is useful, and if AI is useful, it can make money."

1. China's AI Shockwave: Wall Street Misunderstood Again

Host Mike Allen opened with the most sensitive topic: the FT reported that China is considering tightening export controls on AI models and semiconductors. The emergence of Kimi, a Chinese model, sent Nvidia's stock price tumbling, and chip stocks fell 18% in a month. What did Wall Street get wrong?

Jensen Huang's answer was crisp and clear. He said the market got it wrong once with DeepSeek, and now again. "Good models lead to more usage, more usage means selling more Nvidia computers. We need to build more data centers, provide more services, and technology will penetrate more industries." He repeatedly emphasized this logic chain: good models lead to good applications, good applications lead to growth, and growth requires more computing power.

Regarding whether Chinese models like Kimi should be banned, his answer was equally direct: "Of course you should use them; it's very smart." He explained that after downloading a model, you can fine-tune it, enhance it, and add guardrails. The model runs in a so-called "harness," which itself runs in a "sandbox." The sandbox is secure, with privacy protection, security controls, and access controls. He compared it to operating systems: Linux is open source, reviewed, tested, and hardened by millions worldwide, so we can trust it. The same logic applies to open-source AI models.

He also mentioned a point that is easy to overlook: open models and closed models are not opposing forces. "The people most likely to upgrade to a good model like Anthropic or OpenAI are those already using AI." Free models lower the barrier to trying AI. Once users get accustomed to it, they naturally want better service and will pay closed-model vendors. So, the more open-source models there are, the greater the opportunity for closed models.

When asked about NVIDIA's sales in China, Huang gave an answer that surprised many: "Our sales in China today are approximately zero." He said he has already told investors not to expect any revenue from China. If the Chinese government and market welcome them back, it would be "a great honor," but until then, consider it zero.

2. Where AI Doomsayers Go Wrong

This was the most combative part of the entire conversation. The host asked: Are some of your tech peers overstating the risks of AI?

Huang's response was unsparing. "Warning people is okay, warning people with a solution is even better, but making up facts is absolutely unacceptable." He then called out several popular AI panic narratives: "Saying AI will end humanity is complete nonsense. Saying AI will eliminate half of American jobs is complete nonsense. All the facts and evidence point to the opposite."

He provided several specific examples to support his argument. The number of radiologists has increased by about 20% because, after AI automated scan analysis, doctors can see more patients, and there are so many people needing care that more radiologists are needed. The number of paralegals has increased by about 10%, for the same reason. Manufacturing jobs have grown by about 50% over the past few years because AI data centers need to be built and chips need to be produced.

"Intuition and common sense tell you AI will increase productivity, and increased productivity creates opportunities. Throughout history, technology has made society more efficient, creating more jobs, not fewer. If that weren't the case, the US should only have 100,000 jobs today."

He also took aim at AI leaders. "Doomsayers spend too much time theorizing about sci-fi endings; maybe it makes them look smart." When pressed on whether he was referring to certain AI company CEOs, he didn't deny it. Instead, he said: "If you wanted to alert the world to the incredible capabilities of this technology, that goal has been achieved. We should now spend our time on how to make the technology safe. That's the responsibility of technology leaders."

When the host mentioned that Asia's attitude towards AI is completely different from America's, and that Huang is mobbed by fans and asked for autographs in Asia, his explanation was telling: "Maybe it's because the doomsayers spend too much time making up sci-fi endings." In Asia, people embrace AI as a tool and an opportunity, rather than fear it as a threat.

3. The Chip Industry Must Expand 5 to 10 Times; a Bubble is Unlikely Within Five Years

The host posed a sharp question: Every industrial revolution goes through a bubble. Where is the bubble risk for this generation?

Huang's answer was cautious but clear. "A bubble will come someday, but not today. We are at the very beginning of construction." He gave a timeframe: unlikely within five years, and between five and ten years, it depends. The reason lies in a comprehensive supply-side constraint. "The industry can build faster now, but chips are insufficient, memory is insufficient, land is insufficient, electricity is insufficient, even construction workers are insufficient. We are constrained in every direction and in every aspect."

This constraint is precisely a good thing, he said. "This constraint holds the system back, giving us ample time to build infrastructure." Demand is strong, but the ability to convert demand into productive supercomputers is delayed due to all these physical limitations. This pushes the point of oversupply further out.

More critically, he shared his assessment of the overall size of the semiconductor industry. "I believe the semiconductor industry needs to expand 5 to 10 times." Over what timeframe? "Over the next ten years." This means today's chip industry is still far too small to support the construction needs of AI infrastructure.

He explained why this time is different from past semiconductor cycles. "It's different this time because it's not demand-driven, not seasonal, not consumer-driven. It's driven by industrial infrastructure." Just as the world needs energy, the internet, highways, and railways, it now needs a layer of AI intelligence infrastructure built on top of all existing infrastructure. This layer requires chips.

Regarding the risk of customers borrowing money to buy NVIDIA products, he said he is not too worried. "These companies are excellent companies; they generate a lot of cash." He specifically mentioned the startup of the AI profit flywheel: AI is useful, so AI can make money. Coding agents are extremely profitable; they do useful work in high-paying roles, and many companies are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually to enhance their coding capabilities. "This flywheel has already started."

4. Token Economics: Smarter AI is More Valuable

This was the most technically profound part of the entire conversation. The host asked: What makes you confident that tokens will become increasingly profitable?

Huang's explanation was vivid. "A token is an embedding. It embeds knowledge and intelligence. This number is not static, like the constant pi. The intelligence encoded in this number gets smarter over time." As intelligence becomes smarter, it becomes more useful, more valuable, and people are willing to pay more for it.

He compared the AI industry to the software industry of the past. The old software industry was "light capital," so software companies had high gross margins. But the software industry in the AI era will become more "capital intensive" because producing modern software requires a machine like the supercomputer in front of him to generate intelligence. Every industry will become more capital intensive, but the reward is incredible intelligence, productivity, and growth.

"We are laying the foundation and building infrastructure. This is the largest-scale industrial infrastructure buildout in human history."

On the question of whether AI has already peaked, his answer was: "It's impossible to have peaked because AI's penetration into society and various industries has only just begun." He also mentioned that $300 billion has flowed into venture capital and startups in the past six months alone in the US, creating new jobs and new companies.

5. Trump, Regulation, and Government Equity

Jensen Huang's assessment of Trump was surprisingly specific. "He's smart, remembers everything. Oh my god, he really understands numbers." He noted that Trump is the only president who can remember NVIDIA chip model names like H20, H200, and Blackwell, and even knows the next-generation product is called Rubin.

He recounted their first meeting: "He said he wanted to restore America's manufacturing capability, wanted to re-industrialize America, wanted a secure and resilient supply chain, and wanted to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US." He said the Fort Worth factory where they were sitting for the interview was a direct result of that conversation.

When asked what mistake the government should avoid, Huang showed rare anxiety. "I worry about over-regulation, over-correction." He said some companies want the government to help create favorable regulations for them. "I believe we should compete openly." He dismissed the comparison of the AI race to a 100-meter dash as "nonsense": "Whoever gets to the finish line first wins forever? That's nonsense. Ultimate victory depends on whether society uses the technology; it has nothing to do with who invented it. We didn't invent electricity or manufacturing, but America applied them faster and with more enthusiasm, which made it the America it is today."

The host pressed further: If Trump called asking for an equity stake in Nvidia, what would you say? Huang's answer was clever: "There's no need. America already has equity in NVIDIA. We paid $10 billion in taxes last year, and we'll pay more this year. We create a lot of jobs and tax revenue. And don't forget, most Americans are in the stock market today; when the market goes up, everyone benefits."

Regarding whether Anthropic's Mythos model should be open to everyone (currently only accessible to specific institutions), Huang's stance was very clear: "Of course it should be open to everyone." He said it's Anthropic's responsibility to ensure the technology's safety, just like any software – find vulnerabilities and fix them ASAP. He mentioned the jailbreak incident with Mythos, saying "everything is fine, you and I are still here chatting."

On the issue of open-model companies distilling closed models and then reselling them, his attitude was balanced: "It depends on the terms of service. If the service provider is unhappy, they should contact that company. We have many traditional legal means to handle it." But he emphasized that AI learning from other sources is a fundamental characteristic of intelligence. "AI must learn from something. The original AI also scraped all the existing knowledge on the internet. Now AI generates more content than humans do, and in a few years, 99% of the content on the internet will be AI-generated. You are constantly distilling the intelligence of other AIs anyway."

6. Robotics' ChatGPT Moment and the Era of Trillions of Agents

The host asked: When will the ChatGPT moment for robotics arrive?

Jensen Huang gave a surprising answer: "The ChatGPT moment for robotics has already arrived." He explained that the ChatGPT moment wasn't when AI became useful. When ChatGPT came out in 2022, it was just "interesting and surprising." It took another four years to become truly useful. Robotics is now in that "interesting, surprising" phase. You can tell a robot "put the apple in the drawer," and it will reason out the task sequence, including opening the drawer first, then putting the apple in. "When you see a mechanical robot truly achieve these things for the first time, it opens up your imagination about the future of robotics."

As for when it will become useful, he gave a timeframe of "three to four years" and said "I wouldn't be surprised."

Regarding the era of agents, he painted a stunning picture. A billion people use computers today, but most of the time, the computers are idle. In the future, everyone will be assisted by a multitude of agents running on computers 24/7. "We will have 100 billion, trillions of agents running around the clock. Smart agents, less smart agents, specialized agents, super agents – all kinds of agents running 24/7. So the number of computers we need will grow significantly."

7. The CEO's Kung Fu and Philosophy of Suffering

The conversation concluded by returning to Jensen Huang personally. The host mentioned he founded NVIDIA at age 30, and now the company has a market cap of $5 trillion but only 50,000 employees. He said it might only grow to 75,000 in ten years, aiming to stay "as small as possible."

Huang defines the CEO's job as "strategy." "Strategy is using limited resources to achieve a future vision as efficiently as possible." He said he started this job at 30 and is probably the longest-standing CEO in tech history. "This is my craft. This is my kung fu."

Regarding the theory that "pain and suffering are crucial for greatness," he clarified that it's not about a specific painful event but more of a continuous state.