Nvidia's Huang, Nokia CEO Talk Partnership and AI Push

I want to try and understand something you mentioned very briefly, which is the strategic importance of not just the equity stake, but the partnership on technology, and not just for NVIDIA, but for America. Why are you moving into this domain? One, we announced a brand new platform for a new market we've never been in, and so that's number one. Number two, if we take advantage of this transition from general purpose computing to accelerated computing from old types of software to AI, we can take advantage of this transition of AI and 6G for America to win back telecommunications again. It's been a long time since the American telecommunication network has been built on American technology. You used the word national security, I believe. For national security reasons, for economic reasons, our industry should be built on American technology, and for the very first time, we can do that. We have a brand new product line that takes advantage of computing, accelerated computing, and AI, and we have a great partner to help us do it with, Nokia. The market reaction kind of speaks for itself. There was a time when Nokia was already looking to America. You've been in the role since April, but may I start by asking you what role the administration played in bringing you both together, if this is indeed a strategic priority? I don't think there was anything specific that the administration did, other than they've created the environment to support innovation. Jensen's talked about manufacturing, but it's also about R&D, and innovation, and technology leadership. If you think about where this world is going, and all those incredible devices that are going to be built on NVIDIA platforms, robotics, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, virtual reality, we need a different kind of network in the future. That's what we realized, and that's why we wanted to forge this partnership, so that we're building a network leveraging AI for AI services. That's really the big change here. The technology is flowing both ways. What is it that you will be able to do with Nokia, Jensen, that you weren't able to do on your own? Well, first of all, Nokia is in all of the world's base stations, and this air-scale platform of Nokia is in millions of base stations around the world. If our computers are not inside that base station, it doesn't help. It's no different than NVIDIA's tech computing platforms not inside a car, it doesn't help. The first thing is, we need a partner to get us into the world's base stations. We also, remember, we're bringing AI to radio networks, AI to RAM, so that we can make wireless tech communications a lot more efficient. Second, we're bringing AI for the radio, meaning on top of these radio networks and these telecommunication networks, we're going to be able to provide AI services, which is going to be able to make it easier for us to do robotics and autonomous vehicles and industrial automation and reach all of the different places around the world. That's kind of hard to do with Wi-Fi. Cellular reads everything. And so we now have this fabric that we can deploy AI computing services on top of. It's going to be completely revolutionary. In your world and in your market, Huawei is an influential player, not just in Europe. I think also about the Middle East and Africa. How important is the relationship with NVIDIA to be able to counter, you know, what Huawei does in those markets? Yeah, look, I think for us, one of the principles I've had with my team since coming in has been do what we can do that no one else can do. And that is air scale. What we do with any RAN software, the software that runs on that, that we're going to be putting on the NVIDIA ARC platform, that do what we can do well and partner with the best everywhere else. And this is a this is a clear opportunity to partner with the best. And by the way, that's where America and the Western world succeeds, because we don't necessarily have one company doing everything like Huawei. We succeed because we partner aggressively. And you if you watch GTC today, it was hard to not find it obvious that you're partnering with everybody. But that's that's the advantage is this partnership. So we do what we do best. We let NVIDIA do what they do best. And ultimately, our customers win. And ultimately for America, I think America will win because there'll be more innovation faster. Nobody knows telecommunications better than Nokia. They've been at it for a long time. They're all over the world. And between our two partnerships, we now have wireless telecommunications. We have AI and we have accelerated computing all in this partnership. And so all of that capability is going to be brought to bear for the next generation of 6G. And I think that said, this is a this the capabilities we're bringing together in this partnership is quite unique and informal and form formidable. Why was it important, Jensen, that NVIDIA ends up with almost 3 percent of Nokia? What was the rationale behind that? The work that we're doing is so intensive and quite frankly, I was so optimistic about it and so excited about it and that we wanted to invest in Nokia so that we could be part of this incredible success that we're creating together. And I got to tell you that that move was pretty genius, wouldn't you say? That's not for me to comment on. What I'd observe is, you know, 25 percent jump in the ADRs. What does that signal to you? You know, NVIDIA, with respect, Jensen, I've known to be about speed. Is it that they're giving you a technology that you wouldn't otherwise have or have you now a way of just moving faster? Yeah, it's both. I mean, there's obviously, you know, there's no way we're going to have NVIDIA's technology and accelerated computing. I mean, the CUDA software stack, all of the capabilities, even the fundamentals of what's in Arial, the software stack that that NVIDIA has built is an accelerator for us. And then it's about speed because now we can innovate much faster. And for us, it's that shift into adding value and software and thinking more like a software company and really not like a software company, like an application company that's going to use AI and AI models to continue to innovate and move faster. And I think the market recognizes that this is the kind of innovation that this industry has needed. Look, this industry has a history. 3G, we were building better voice networks when the Internet was getting started. You know, 4G, 5G, we were building data networks behind where the market was. And today, 5G, when you look at it globally, it's still only partially deployed. So as you look ahead, in order to innovate, you've got to move much faster. And we need to enable our customers to have different and better technology. And with this partnership, all of us, speaking of speed, we're in Blackwell today. It's going to go to Rubin. It's going to go Feynman. And it's going to go on a clip that basically is at the speed of light. I've got to ask you to clarify something, Jensen. You showed a slide behind you. 500 billion dollars over what I think illustrated six financial quarters, but 20 million Blackwell. Five financial quarters. Five financial quarters. Does that figure include networking? We know it doesn't include China because it seemed to be technically above consensus. Right. But you seem to be suggesting that there is near term actually an acceleration beyond what you were expecting. All of that was only data center. Just that's the amazing thing. All of that is only data center. Today, we announced several new platforms. The NVIDIA Drive Hyperion platform, our Arc platform, our Quantum platform. None of that is included in that half a trillion dollars. No networking. No networking whatsoever. Well, that's data center. So networking, NVIDIA networking for data centers, but not wireless networking, not wireless telecommunications. When do we see a real world manifestation of the work that you're both going to do together? Yeah, there's work going already. You can see a demo actually at the booth here in GTC. You'll also see customer trials early next year. And then we think in full commercial production in 27. And, you know, the great thing about the partnership with Jensen is I know he'll be pushing me to go faster, and I'll be pushing his team to go faster. And together, that means that we can get to market as soon as practical for our customers. And Arc is backwards compatible with AirScale. Right. And all of those millions of base stations could be upgraded to 6G and AI. There's a lot of skepticism on 6G there, right? Like we're agreeing standards, just a simple yes or no question, really. Is the 6G timeline accelerated because of this partnership? I think it is, because what you can actually do now is, you know, exactly to what Jensen said, you can you can deploy with Arc and then if something happens or the standard evolves or, you know, or there's there's changes, it'll just be a software model update that we deploy in applications. It's a completely different model than what we're used to back in the days of deploying these complex integrated legacy appliances. It's general purpose accelerated computing. And that's why we think it's so compelling. If the standards change, you've got to go fix a chip. If the standards change, you're just and I just upgrade the software, the CUDA software. That's the amazing thing. Jensen, you are traveling onwards now to Asia. I don't know what your schedule is for the jet, and I don't know if you and the president will be at the same place at the same time. He seemed to think you would be. But the main point is, is that you're here in Washington, D.C. We're a few blocks from the White House. You called it the AI Super Bowl. Others called it that, too. But everyone is inferring from this that this was about all of the things we talked about all year, that you want to be closely aligned with this administration. And while in Asia, that there is something that the president needs to work on in the context of China trade negotiations, whether you get to meet him or not. What is it that you need the president to do for NVIDIA to accelerate on its plans? We need the president to do what's right for America. And I'm certain he's going to go do that. The reason why we're here is because technology is now so important in politics and geopolitics. It is the single most important industry in America. It is our national treasure. And it's important for us to make sure that Washington, D.C. and the policymakers and all of the people who serve our country to make it great understands the technology as it stands today and where we're going to go and the companies that matter to us so that we can make America great. And so that that was the primary reason as we as well. First of all, whenever there's an opportunity to see the president, I always love that. He's incredibly engaging. He's always learning and he wants to help America win. He wants America to win. This is my final question. I was trying to interpret what you were saying. It was a detailed presentation, but you talked about how AI is now worth paying for. You talked about the end or not of Moore's law, depending on your point of view, but the need to scale to meet demand. Was that you saying we are not in an AI bubble? I don't believe we're in the bubble. And the reason for that is we're going through a natural transition from a old computing model based on general purpose computing to accelerated computing. We also know that AI has now become good enough because of reasoning capability, research capabilities, its ability to think it's now generating tokens and now generating intelligence that's worth paying for to the point where I'm paying lots of it. Cursor is all over NVIDIA. Every single one of our engineers use it. We pay lots and lots of money for it. We're delighted to do it. And Cursor is just one of the applications. You know, what is it? Eleven, eleven, eleven tech. I forget. But anyways, all of these different AI models that we're using, we're using plenty of services and paying, paying happily doing it.