Nvidia CEO Huang Says He Would Not Sell Chips to Irresponsible AI Customers

You're traveling across Europe promoting this idea of sovereign. Why is it still sovereign if it's built on American ships? Yes. Uh, sovereignty basically means that you have to control your own experience. And in the case of AI, that means control your own data, your data, your life experience, your, you know, company experience, or your country's culture values, um, the institutional knowledge of your people. Uh, the flywheel of creating more data, more experience, more intelligence that belongs to you. And, uh, the computer is, is just an instrument. And so that's one. The second is, is sovereignty means that nobody could deny you service. You know, like I say, like infrastructures, like electricity is like an internet. It's like water. And and, uh, those are critical resources and critical infrastructure for your society and your companies. You can't you can't ever have a denial of service. And so you have to control that. That's sovereignty. Um, sovereignty means that that you have the ability to determine your own, your own destiny. And you might. You might need teamwork. You might need collaboration, might part partnership and support from other people. But at some, you know, you have you have agency. More than 100 data center projects have been blocked or delayed in the U.S. just so far this year. There's push back in Europe too. You have IPOs getting delayed, getting scrapped. Are we seeing cracks in the eye boom. And could you be left holding the bag. The capabilities of I know that we know what it can do. That's never going to go back. So I think I think a lot of many ways it's fundamental and it's uh, uh, irrespective of, of um, uh, near-term, near-term challenges. Now the near-term challenges are somehow also so self-imposed. I think we're, you know, as a as an industry, we do we're doing a horrible job, um, associating, uh, this technology, which is built by people. Um, it's engineered obviously. Uh, we obviously know enough about how it works to make it better every day. And, um, uh, because we're building it, we have every possibility to to advance it safely and responsibly. And so I think in a lot of ways, uh, the narrative of the industry is, is really out of control and not to be stopped. Um, uh, but that's, that's just, uh, an industry growing up, you know, and that's you probably remember the good old days of the internet and, um, uh, the industry grew up. And I think that our industry is, is, uh, many of the young companies are going through their growing pains and, uh, they're growing, of course, incredibly fast, which I'm very proud of. And, um, they're just incredible engineers and really bright, bright computer scientists. Um, there's a there's an accountability responsibility, uh, that goes along with building companies that I think there was there's just growing into a major investor in anthropic and OpenAI. These are two of your major customers as well. What happens when the frontier Labs go public? How much is at stake and what do they need to prove? What I would say is that that, um, uh, I'm delighted to see their success. I mean, first of all, these are the two fastest growing technology companies in history. Their revenues are real, and their profits generated from the revenues are real. This last year, this last six months, I went through a transition. It used to be unprofitable, unusable. Very curious. Very, you know, great potential. And now we're using it in real work. It's productive and profitable. It's generating enormous profits for them. And so because the tokens are now profitable and because the token demand is so incredible, it's the reason why they want more compute, because the compute translates to more tokens to more profits. And that flywheel for them is going to be great. And so I think I think their their IPO is just, you know of course another day in their journey. And it's a very important day for them. And they raise a lot of money and um, that they can apply that money to, to fueling their growth. And so, so I think that's the two labs. Now we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg with the two of them. Because in the most, most, if you will, visible. But if you look at the eye industry, it's broad and it's extremely deep. It's also extremely expensive. I mean, when the when investors see what I really costs, are they going to be happy or, you know, are they going to decide the numbers don't add up the cost of eye. The cost of a token Is reducing by 3040 times per year. And so I think that the the cost of tokens is decreasing. The cost of intelligence is also decreasing. And so the benefits of customers are actually going up exponentially. That said AI is deeply unpopular and people are scared. Sam Altman, Elon Musk all say we should slow down. You have been very consistent in your optimism. What do you see that they don't? And how can they be so wrong? Uh, first of all, safety is is paramount. And we in order for us to to realize the incredible potentials and and the optimistic future that that we all hope for and and believe in. Um, we have to develop the technology safely, responsibly. I believe we have agency in how this technology advances. We should accelerate the development of open shell. We should accelerate the the integration of this containment technology into AI systems. We should accelerate the development of monitoring technologies and I is the monitor eyes. So we should accelerate AI technology. And so I think that there's a fallacy. I think it's it's it's in fact a mistake to separate AI capability. And I safety as if there's two conversations. It's one conversation. If one of the labs was doing something that was too dangerous, that you felt was too dangerous, would Nvidia stop selling to them? It's a hypothetical, but of course, yeah. You know, it's a hypothetical, but of course. But before you do so you would have that conversation. And you know that we don't run other people's companies and, and, um, there's a limit to, to the judgment by which we apply, uh, to other companies use of our technology. Our technology is general purpose. And so imposing our values on some other people's companies and it want less, for example, institutions or countries, uh, that's really largely out of balance. But if we if we know for certain that an applicant that an application of our technology is bringing harm to people. Of course.