The Rise and Reckoning of Jensen Huang | The Circuit with Emily Chang

Nvidia's really in its biggest crisis in its three decade history of operation. There's all the components right now of a huge drama. In the last few days, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has been at the center of a firestorm. CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to having an extramarital affair after reports he was targeted by a suspected Chinese spy. American officials suspect she fed information to China and also helped smuggle advanced AI chips into the country. Jensen Huang said to have had a relationship with an Nvidia executive who reports to him. With these stunning revelations, Huang's judgment is being called into question and he's now the focus of internal and government investigations. But just a few weeks ago, things were looking very different. Hi, Jensen. Hi Jensen. So this is... Jensanity. Thanks for having us on this trip. Welcome to Europe. Kicking it off in Paris. In October, we followed NVIDIA's CEO across Europe at the height of his power, traveling to four countries in four days. The leader of the leading AI chip maker appeared to be on a mission to sell the world on a revolution powered by Nvidia chips. We invested $8 billion in Europe, and so $8 billion worth of jobs. It's a lot of jobs. The chip maker has poured billions of dollars into startups, frontier labs, and data centers, and Huang seemed like a man defying gravity until everything came crashing down. Jensen Huang is under investigation. Nvidia is in fact now preparing to oust Jensen Huang as the CEO of the company that he founded. Nvidia is Jensen and Jensen is Nvidia. Nvidia's board says it has no reason to believe company secrets or US national security were compromised. China calls the allegations a smear. I know the FBI's looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he'll be in good shape. But the episode has transformed the meaning of our time with Huang. We're probably the only AI company in the world that works with every AI company in the world. So at what point does that dependence on one single company become a systemic risk? Well, they don't depend on us. They choose us. What began as a window into the massive influence of a man at the peak now looks more like a portrait of concentrated power. It sent an entire industry into crisis and raises tough questions about how much that industry should depend on one person and their company. How do you go to all these cities? How do you keep up? Like what are your travel must-haves? Just pack my bags. I was up at midnight and I've been working since. And here you are. Without dragging this out too long, I would actually like to welcome a surprise guest, Mr. Jensen Huang. On day one of his European tour, Huang hyped up AI agents. This is really the beginning now of AI becoming useful. We're seeing agents emerging in, in, in just about every single industry. And raffled off two of Nvidia's new souped up AI computers that retail for thousands of dollars each. Leaving the stage, he was instantly mobbed by fans. Back up a little bit. It's my second thing to meet you. Can I take a picture? Just a picture. So this is Jensanity. Everyone's trying to get a picture with Jensen. Clearly it's very contagious. Excuse us, please. We're heading this way. Excuse us Huang was here to drum beat his vision for a global AI ecosystem, announcing investments and partnerships at all levels of the technology. France is jockeying to become Europe's AI center. Noteworthy technical talent has come out of the country, powering major companies like Paris-based Mistral and New York-based Hugging Face, which Nvidia agreed to acquire for $12.9 billion. Jensen likes to say AI is like a five-layer cake. It's from the bottom up. Energy, chips, infrastructure, the models, and the apps on top. Now, Nvidia started out squarely in layer two, making the chips, but that has since changed. And now Nvidia is investing up and down all the layers of the cake in power, in data centers, in the AI labs, in startups, which means no matter how you slice it, more and more of the AI industry runs through Nvidia. You know what? Since Emily's going to be filming, I want to put my whiskey down. In the last year alone, we have invested $8 billion in European startups. And in the next week, I'm going to announce another two more billion dollars. There's been a lot of talk that AI was going to end humanity. You're saying it's a zero percent chance. It's just an engineering problem and you got it solved. It's what you're saying. No. What I say is that it is in our control. Between now and the end of humanity, we're going to have a lot of work to do. Advancing capability, advancing safety are not in conflict. They are in fact one. Okay, you guys, I want to thank all of you for coming. This is the beginning of AI in Europe. Let's go build it together, okay? Thank you. Thank you. So there's more stuff happening later tonight. He's going to be meeting with government officials, other CEOs, other important people in the tech industry in France, and next up London. Estimates that the EU will need to spend at least $3 trillion by 2035 just to be truly self-sufficient in technology. Just got off the train in London and I'm off to meet Jensen. 27 years ago, NVIDIA went public and they put me in this hotel. Oh, really? Yes. It was the first time I ever had a butler. This was 2000 and you'll be blown away, $300 million. Things have changed. $300 million. That was a lot back then though. No, no, no, it was fine. I was just happy to make it. You were such an unlikely winner back then. Yeah, I was just happy to stay in business. Didn't know what I was doing. Didn't know how to write a business plan. And now? No, still don't know how to write a business plan. What makes this trip a success? Is it like government commitments, selling chips, data centers? I don't have a end game. I don't have a roadmap. I don't have a plan. I'm not trying to get anywhere. There's no completion. I'm kind of one of those people that the journey, the journey is the destination. Huang's bio might make you think otherwise. The highlight reel goes something like, Born in Taiwan in 1963, moved to the US and earned a national ranking in table tennis. Famously loved his job washing dishes at Denny's. Skipped a couple grades, started college at 16 at Oregon State, studied electrical engineering, became a chip designer at competitor to be AMD. Then in 1993, NVIDIA was born with humble beginnings. For $200, I bought 15%. I think it was 20% of NVIDIA. Huang and his two business partners wanted to create chips, specifically GPUs, that would make for better video game graphics, but it was a rocky start. In 2006, Nvidia unveiled CUDA, software that allowed its chips to do more than run video games from weather forecasting to gene sequencing. AI researchers soon discovered those same chips could be used to train their models. When word got back to Huang, he went all in, betting big on tech built for AI before most of the industry caught on. Nvidia powered the early breakthroughs that brought AI mainstream, and it's been one of the most lucrative bets in corporate history. Today, you'll find Nvidia at the core of most major tech companies, OpenAI, Meta, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, SpaceX, Amazon, and the list goes on. And Huang may be even bigger than the company he runs, parlaying influence into seats at the world's most exclusive tables and taking conveniently timed phone calls from heads of state. Mr. President. You have President Trump on speed dial. What happens when your views differ from the president's? How do you walk that line? We don't have to agree on anything. It's not my job to agree or disagree. It's my job to inform him of the decisions that we make impact not just the American citizens, the prosperity of our future, it impacts the world. And so if ever I have an opportunity to help inform him so that he could make a better decision, whatever the decision is, whether it serves me, whether it's counter my interests, it's not my concern. It's only my concern that I have an opportunity to inform him, and that's it. 100%, that's how I feel. It's a who's who of leaders in the tech and AI space who have descended upon the White House. Doesn't really feel like we're going to get any sort of tangible way forward here when it comes to the future of regulation. The main point here is that nobody wants to cede competition when it comes to China. In late September, Huang was among a group of tech titans called to the White House for a summit where lunch was served with a side of super intelligence. We're using the word super because the other word is a fake word. Huang stood alongside the president as he rebranded AI as super intelligence and lauded a new White House Accord that puts the tech industry in charge of voluntarily policing itself as it races to advance AI. You spent the last three months trying to demystify AI. You said it's not a new species, it's just a bunch of code. Isn't calling it super the opposite of that? Actually, I think calling it super is the opposite of artificial. Super intelligence. Super intelligence. Super is the new word. Yeah. I do think it's better than artificial. And I think President Trump's point is that artificial just says fake. Well, everything's fake. We built it. And so I think at some level, this is fake. We're in a fake structure. It was built by humans, but we don't say that. It's a fake horse, otherwise known as a car, but we don't say that. Is it super intelligence? Absolutely. I mean, it does a better job researching than I do. It does a better job writing than I do. It's not super at everything that we do, but it's super at many things that we do. That day at the White House, one critic said, "The pledge he made them sign was great for the cameras, but utterly meaningless." The people building the technology are effectively helping to write the rules that govern it. Is that appropriate? I think it's very appropriate, and the reason for that is this. Before we expect governments and third parties to regulate us, we should hold ourselves to the highest possible responsibilities, standards, accountability. The structure that was described is very similar to the way that safety systems are internally audited and externally audited by many industries. Even if we would've had a government regulation or international government regulation, who would do the auditing if we didn't have the ecosystem of companies that have the capability to do so? And so we have to go and create that industry. We have to go find startups. We have to encourage countries and companies to get involved. And so we've got a lot of developing to do. This call for development is a familiar part of Huang's message to the world that all countries need to build and control their own AI. He's popularizing a term for this, sovereign AI. The realization that control of data is power has compelled other countries to quickly develop their own models and infrastructure. Establishing an independent AI ecosystem entirely from scratch would take decades. So Huang's pitch is each country can simply build their own capabilities on Nvidia, which also means the more sovereign AI, the more demand for NVIDIA chips. You're traveling across Europe promoting this idea of sovereign AI. Is it still sovereign if it's built on American chips? Yes. 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 company experience, your country's culture, values, the institutional knowledge of your people, the flywheel of creating more data, more experience, more intelligence, that belongs to you. Sovereignty means that you have the ability to determine your own destiny. You might need teamwork, you might need collaboration, might partnership and support from other people. You could of course stand on the shoulder of giants. You could start with somebody else's technology, open models, for example, but then you could adapt it and fine tune it. So I think in every single way, open models, Nvidia's technology, their own ecosystem, their own data flywheel, their own agency, their own aspirations and hopes, that gives them sovereignty. I understand we're in the home of humanoids. Oh, I see a humanoid right there, and there's a couple right in front of me. In London, Huang bounced around between events, handing out computers, taking few, if any, breaks. All I've had today is a quarter of a half of a sandwich. And going full Oprah with startup capital. I'm investing in you. I'm investing in you. I'm investing in you. While hammering on his message that AI can be safe and controllable. And so if you're asking an autonomous system to make you an omelet, you don't have to give it access to a chainsaw, okay, or a shotgun. AI news was coming thick and fast as Huang made the rounds. At one event, he gave a shout out to London-based data center operator Nscale, backed by Nvidia. I don't know. Is Josh here? Is Nscale here? You could be the most valuable UK startup created in the last 10 years. But just a few days later, investors got a case of the AI build-out jitters and were questioning Nscale's valuation. Microsoft pulled out of a deal with the company citing concerns about the cost of electricity in the UK. UK's really the Goldilocks moment. You have every aspect necessary to take advantage of this new industrial revolution, and you just have to activate it. There's a strange general behavior in the UK. If there was a million ways to win, you find the one reason not to do it. And I think you overthink things. As more countries develop more powerful AI, does that become harder to police and align on safety? Do we need something like a UN for AI? Maybe. First of all, dialogue needs to happen. As you know, with any movement, it takes two people to start anything. And so I think every country wants to be part of this dialogue. How could any country not be part of the dialogue of intelligence? Despite Huang's call to action, international tensions over AI development have been rising. He's been pushing the White House for favorable regulation and playing both sides of the AI arms race. Since AI advancement is limited by how good the chips are, NVIDIA's hardware is a crown jewel for the United States, technology that some leaders say should be safeguarded as a unique advantage. But Huang has been among the loudest voices in Silicon Valley, arguing that limiting China's access to US technology will only make Beijing's domestic capability stronger in the long run. The US approved selling older NVIDIA chips to China, but there are companies like DeepSeek that are prioritizing building on Chinese hardware. Is the promise of that market slipping away at all or shrinking at all? Well, it's completely blocked from us today. I did my best to inform the policymakers in the United States of the importance of engaging the Chinese market and making sure that we serve that market for as long as we can. I think we made a mistake, and this mistake is hard to unwind, but I did my best. That's all I could do. There are more Chinese AI researchers than any other nation in the world, and many of them working at the labs. I've been very clear that even though, although we compete against China, they're not our enemies. If we care deeply about the safety of the world with respect to artificial intelligence, then of course we must open dialogues. We must work with them in every possible way. A man talking to everyone everywhere comes with risks, something we discovered after the recording of this interview. US Intelligence has reportedly identified Alice Huang, also known as Huang Lu, a former television journalist, as a spy who was recruited by Beijing to target the Nvidia CEO. She's an executive at Megaspeed International, one of the largest buyers of NVIDIA chips in Southeast Asia, which US officials suspect of smuggling advanced chips to China. President Trump was reportedly warned about their relationship before flying with Huang on Air Force One in May to China. The Nvidia CEO initially said the interactions were normal and not unusual, but later admitted to the affair. In a memo to employees, Huang wrote, "I owe my family and all of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did, but this has turned into something much bigger than an infidelity scandal." Bloomberg reported that in 2025, Nvidia intervened in a US government probe of suspected smuggling of AI chips by Megaspeed. Is there anything that China could do or that could change in the relationship between the United States and China that would make you say maybe we shouldn't sell our chips to them? Well, there are a lot of things that they can do theoretically. They're pragmatic people. They want what's in the best interest of their nation and their people. They want to be successful. United States want to be successful. We want America to be rich. They want China to be rich, and we should respect that aspiration. We should be comforted by nations that want prosperity, that want better for their people. It's the nations that don't want prosperity, don't care about what's in the interest of their people. Those are nations we should be concerned about. One of the best things that they've done, of course, is lifted the opportunities and the prosperity of hundreds of millions of people on earth, and that's been great for every country, including ours. But the AI race is a struggle for dominance with every player under enormous pressure to move faster. There are fears that the pace could put humanity in danger. OpenAI has disclosed six new incidents of what it calls AI model misalignment. Anthropic says that its Claude AI model went rogue, carrying out unintended actions. To calm anxiety about rogue AI, Nvidia released an open source safety platform of its own called OpenShell, designed to govern AI agents, even shut them down if necessary. But this announcement suggests the current safety issues require an engineering solution rather than a regulatory one. AI is deeply unpopular and people are scared. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk all say we should slow down. You have been very consistent in your optimism. What do you see that they don't? You don't advance capability leaving safety behind. You don't advance safety leaving capability behind. So let me give you an example. When AI first came out, the first criticism of the original ChatGPT was, of course, hallucination. It was just spewing nonsense. And so in order for us to make these chatbots grounded in truth, we have to invent something like retrieval augmented generation. We have to expand the context window. We connect it to tools so that it could do a search before it answers the question, knows when to do a search because maybe the information requires contextual information, contemporary information, and so it has to go out and do a search, and all of that is part of its conditioning before it generates the answer. It also reasons afterwards. It reflects on the answer it gave you and you go, "Is this the best answer I could provide?" Or it might even generate two or three different versions of the answer and reflects on which one's the best one. All of that require technology. So safety and capability to me is one idea. Microsoft is calling for an AI emergency brake and says AI is less regulated than washing machines. Anthropic is saying their models could evade shutdown in a matter of months. What would you have to see that might convince you that the industry should slow down or stop? Several things. One, if we're developing agentic systems or autonomous systems, the agents have to be in rigorous containment systems, and those agents must be monitored, just job one. If you're not able to do that, you should not test it. If you're not able to do that, you should not deploy it. Well, these models that went rogue are unreleased models. So is that reason that they should shut down, shut the labs down? No. What they should do is that they should contain and monitor those experiments. But they say they can't contain them. No, that's just made up. Nonsense. I cannot be proven. You can't prove that to me. Yeah, you can absolutely contain, you can absolutely monitor. Until you try to do it, don't tell me you can't do it. And so I'm just not going to listen to that. So are you saying that you don't believe what they're saying? I don't know all that they're saying. If you're developing agentic systems and you can't monitor it, you should not do so. That's just the bottom line. Even the biggest AI optimists see risks. They also see solutions. What is the biggest risk you see? Developing agentic systems without containment... Developing agentic systems without monitoring, it is extremely high risk. You should not do that. And until you have the ability to contain and monitor, you should not run large scale experiments. It just sounds like that's already happening. Then you got to stop. It's really simple. So that would be the message to Anthropic to OpenAI where we've seen these - You should contain your technology, contain your experiments, you should monitor your experiments. You should give these agents, when you deploy them, minimum rights. They should be treated with zero trust. They should be monitored all the time. If one of the labs was doing something that was too dangerous, that you felt was too dangerous, would Nvidia stop selling to them? Well, it's a hypothetical, but of course. Yeah. Yeah, it's a hypothetical, but of course, we don't run other people's companies, and there's a limit to the judgment by which we apply to other companies' use of our technology, our technology's general purpose. But if we know for certain that an application of our technology is bringing harm to people, of course. Get into Thursday. Signs of distress are emerging in leveraged AI computing firms credit jitters sink chip stocks on a six-day losing streak, the longest run of the year so far. And now we're in Stockholm. This is a city known for its canals and its islands, but it's also a thriving tech hub. AI, of course, is a bigger and bigger part of that, and much of it is being powered by NVIDIA. Our guest of honor needs little introduction. Welcome. Welcome to Stockholm. Huang headlined a kickoff for Sweden's Nvidia-backed sovereign AI supercomputer, attended by tech luminaries like Spotify Co-Founder Daniel Ek. We have tremendous educational system that produces incredible talent across many different disciplines and industries. I don't think that there's a problem of potential. I think what we do need is to speed things up and we need to be more ambitious. Meanwhile, more tough AI news was coming in. Data center company CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, was taking a beating in the market over concerns about its debt load. A seemingly unfazed Huang told reporters CoreWeave's strength is improving every day, but other AI stocks were selling off too, as markets seem to be questioning the economics of the AI boom. More than a hundred data center projects have been blocked or delayed in the US just so far this year. There's pushback in Europe too. You have AI IPOs getting delayed, getting scrapped. Are we seeing cracks in the AI boom, and could you be left holding the bag? It's too fundamental. I think this is the future of computing. At the fundamental level, computing will never go back. We used to have computers that the software is written by hand and the computer's waiting for us to use it. In the future and where we are now, computers are able to learn environments and problems that are too complicated for any human to program. The size of it, the way that computers are used instead of a tool, it's not an infrastructure, that's never going to go back. The capabilities of AI now that we know what it can do, that's never going to go back. So I think in a lot many ways it's fundamental irrespective of near-term challenges. And so I think the narrative of the industry is really out of control and ought to be stopped, but that's just an industry growing up. You probably remember the good old days of the internet and the industry grew up. And I think that our industry is many of the young companies are going through their growing pains and they're growing, of course, incredibly fast. There's an accountability responsibility that goes along with building companies that I think they're just growing into. Nvidia keeps adding new products, buying up companies. In some cases, you're competing with your own customers. Why do you need to have such a broad range of offerings? We do as little as we can. It seems like you're doing a lot. Surprisingly little. I think we've done a good job generalizing the work that we do so that it could be applied to many different things, not because we're doing many different things, it's because we generalized one thing. And so if you look at our architecture, we're the only architecture that's general purpose, meaning we run every closed model, we run every open model, we run biology models to language models, auto-regressive models, the transformer models, the diffusion models, and all the different various technologies. The challenge of generalization is, of course, performance. How can you be the world's fastest F1 race car and also be a really great sedan? And so that's the miracle of the technology that we've created. On the one hand, we're the world's fastest F1 racing cars, and we're the fastest computers, and we're always at the top of the leaderboard. You benchmark us, we're always the best. On the other hand, because we're fungible, we're also the lowest cost. Nvidia recently committed to spending about half a trillion dollars across the global AI industry, and that number is quickly climbing. There's concern that in doing so, Nvidia is creating false demand, giving companies the money they need to turn around and buy products from Nvidia. It's no secret that critics have accused Nvidia of circular financing. How do you toe the line between boosting promising startups and blowing up a bubble? If AI is such a gold mine, why do you have to underwrite so much of it? Yeah, this technology requires high CapEx. If you look at this generation of AI startups, it's very, very rare that you find a company that can be funded on $10 million, and it's not unusual to find a company that requires $10 billion. And the reason for that is because it needs this computation resource in order to deliver the intelligence. Some of the highest quality companies in the AI ecosystem across each one of the layers of the five-layer cake, it connects us to the best and the most talented companies. It helps us continue to advance Nvidia's platform, if you will, because these companies are going to be built on Nvidia's technology, and it helps us capitalize and be one of the early investors in many of them. We have a highly disciplined approach of making sure that we are, although one of the earliest investors, and many times even the anchor investor, we're not the lead investor. We're not the largest investor. In all cases, we own less than 20% of the company. We've invested some, I guess, in the last five years, maybe close to $100 billion or something like that. That hundred billion dollars resulted in, well, at least five times as much other institutional investors into this ecosystem. Most of the world's leading AI companies depend on Nvidia, not just your hardware, but your software as well. We're probably the only AI company in the world that works with every AI company in the world. So at what point does that dependence on one single company become a systemic risk? Well, they don't depend on us, they choose us. I don't worry about that. And the reason for that is because we don't take our position for granted. We came from nothing and we have to earn our keep every day. We have competitors in every company, every industry, every country. With respect to the size of the market, just remember, it's just a number. Nvidia can only be as large as the, if you will, the pond that we're in, the market that we're in. But when somebody asks me, America needs to win the AI race, what I hear is not that one or two or three companies wins the AI race. What I mean is America's companies win the AI race. If we do the opposite, we scare people and we cause people anxiety, then America will lose. In a new administration, will NVIDIA's dominance be at risk? Are you prepared? Are we prepared? Yeah, sure. I'm in service of our policymakers and our leaders and whatever they want to talk to me about. I'm more than happy to share with them what I know. I know a lot about this technology. I know a lot about engineering and I know what it takes to build this and I know what we're doing to build it. And if you ask me my thoughts on whether we can advance AI with prosperity for the future while doing so every single step of the way safely and responsibly, I have absolutely zero concern that we have the ability to do so. Now, whether we would do so is a completely different thing, but we have the technology to do so. You said AI supply and demand will balance out in maybe five to 10 years. What happens when the world doesn't need as many new chips? New chips will replace the old chips, just kind of like the personal computer industry. We got, what, a billion users in the world today? In 1993 when NVIDIA was first founded, the personal computer industry was doubling every single year. And of course it doesn't double anymore. At the moment, we're kind of doubling every year. And my sense is that we're going to keep doing that as we build out the infrastructure of the world. And how far out can you see that doubling? We're going to do that for several years and then we'll reevaluate. And so we're kind of two years into an infrastructure build out. And if you look at previous technology cycles, it takes about 10 years or so to reach some kind of maturity. And then after that, you're in replacement cycles. And so did that with phones, did that with the internet, did that with PCs. I think it'll happen here too. Could there be a breakthrough that means AI is powered by a fraction of the energy? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And then what does that mean for Nvidia? No, we're just going to keep making things more efficient. There's a weird dynamic. People used to tell me, "Hey, Jensen, if you make your chips that much better every generation, doesn't it say that customers just buy less?" And that same exact logic goes, if we make companies more productive, don't we hire less people? And there's this weird thing called ambition. If you gave me 36 hours a day, I'm not going to sleep more because I've got ideas, I have things to do. We'll end up doing more. And so if AI makes us all more intelligent, I become more ambitious. If the cost of doing something becomes marginally close to zero, it turns out that resource becomes widely abundant. I think the economy's going to get larger. I think the industries will get larger. I think the semiconductor industry will be, at this point, very clearly one of the largest industries in the world. Chip makers set for their longest losing streak since 2008, leaving investors questioning the prospects for the AI trade. Finally, we're in Berlin. This is where Nvidia is holding its third big conference of the year. Germany built its economy on the last industrial revolution, but the economy's been having kind of a rough time. Jensen likes to say AI is the new industrial revolution, and if anyone could use it, it's here. Germany is rich with the most important part of AI, which is the science, the math, the computer scientists, the physical AI, the deep science capabilities. You have the spirit of innovation, you have the spirit of entrepreneurship. We now have to find a way to get this flywheel going and we have to start by building the computers, the infrastructure. In Berlin, the line to see Huang was out the door and around the block. The event was held at Saturn, which is like a German Best Buy on steroids. Jensen is in the building and he's here. He's here to see everybody tonight. Hey everybody. Hello, Berlin. How do you say Saturn? Satoorn. Everything in German, you got to say it really serious. Satoorn. Obviously you've had this big week, you've gone to so many countries, so much exciting stuff, but at the same time there's constant headlines, this massive market sell off, chip stocks under pressure. As this trip has been going on, what have you been watching in the markets? What's your take on what's happening with CoreWeave? All of this is going to pass and the reason for that is very simple. We're going through a new platform transition. News, as you know, happens all the time, but it won't change the fundamentals. You've said AI will create more jobs than it destroys. AI does create more jobs. You've said people worried about losing their jobs should learn AI. What do you say to the person who has learned AI, who is doing exactly that but still watching their job slip away? Well, first of all, I think you're asking a theoretical question, but let's apply the practical answer first. Now remember, AI is unlike previous technologies in the sense that this requires manufacturing. It's creating construction jobs, electrician jobs, plumbing jobs. In the last six months, something like $400 to $600 billion dollars, were invested into AI startups. And the reason for that is people see AI is productive, it's effective and people want to invest in it. Those four to 600 billion dollars has just created how many jobs? And so of course, this technology is a new tool and this new tool is therefore going to cause everybody's jobs to change. Resisting the change, it won't make it go away. The superpowers that the tech companies have are now made available to literally everybody. It democratized the technology, it's elevated everybody's capabilities. And so I see the benefits of AI. I'm obviously very aware of the risks and the technology risks, but in the final analysis, if I don't see the optimistic, if we don't see the optimistic, incredibly wonderful future that we're going to create, for what reason are we building it? The final act in this dash across Europe was Nvidia's own flagship conference, GTC. Welcome to the stage. Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. Hello, Berlin. Hello, Berlin. The CEO stuck to his bullish pitch, recapping his new European investments and partnerships, announcing new AI security and data center products and playing around with some AI trained robots. What did we talk about? We talked about Europe. Pay attention. Stay focused. Come here. At one point, he was interrupted by a protest over the reported use of Nvidia chips in Russian drones. Thank you. Have a great GTC. You said 0% chance AI ends the world by 2030. What about beyond that, 2040? How far into the future are you so sure? I'm quite sure. I'm quite sure. I'm quite confident in the agency of people. I'm quite confident that today is a safer world than it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and 250 years ago. I'm quite confident in that because the facts would show it. Although the news headlines are more pessimistic and more bad news than ever, but that's just because bad news is easier to sell. Many people appreciate your optimism and get excited by it, but what if your optimism proves wrong in the end? Then I can say that I did everything I could. And the reason for that is because not only am I optimistic, I'm doing everything I can to create the technology necessary to keep the industry safe, secure. And so let's not talk about the future in a pessimistic way while we do nothing about it to prevent that from happening. And so maybe I'm older, I'm more parental. Don't just deliver the bad news. Tell me what you're going to do about it. And so long as we can prove to ourselves that we're doing both sides of that coin, the optimistic future while safeguarding our way in doing so. So long as we do both sides of that, I'm perfectly fine. After a whirlwind week of AI pomp, one thing was clear. Jensen Huang has been the leading evangelist for an extraordinary new age of artificial intelligence. Nvidia, the US economy, maybe even the entire global financial system might just rest on his optimism and accomplishments. But now Huang himself is under scrutiny. He has led the business since its very beginning 33 years ago, and even as Nvidia grew into one of the world's most powerful companies, there's still no one designated to potentially replace him. And the recent allegations show just how tenuous it is to pin the hope and future of an industry on one person. You famously run Nvidia in a very unconventional way, lots of direct reports, no meetings. As the company has exploded in size and the problems have become more complex, how has your management style and your mentality changed? Well, my management style is what made it possible for the company to grow. Our organization is what made the company to thrive and innovate. I wanted to create an architecture of a company with as few silos as possible. The problem with silos, if the organizations are too rigid, then the company has very difficult time adapting to change. So I think a modern company really wants to be more and more agile and less and less structured. What about the CEO who runs that company? You should be as mentally flexible as possible. I think you have to hold yourself responsible. You have agency. You're the CEO of the company for God's sakes. You have to have high standards and expectations. Your son and your daughter are working at Nvidia. I think your son-in-law also works at Nvidia. Robotics, yeah. There is talk that your daughter is in line to be your successor. Is that true? Well, first of all, I don't hope the job on her. And the reason for that is because that's their aspiration, Spencer or Madison's, they have to go earn it. And it's really, really hard work. It takes a lot of sacrifice for many people. They can focus on their job and their families. When you're the CEO of a company, you have to focus on, of course, your family, but I've got a whole bunch of other families I'm caring for. I'm responsible for an entire industry. And so I think the pressure of being the CEO is high and it's supposed to be high. It should not be an easy job. It shouldn't be a job that you take for granted. When I decided to be CEO, I didn't realize the magnitude of the pressure and responsibilities, but look, that's what I signed up for. And so now that my family and all of the people that are near me see the responsibilities of the job and what it takes, then they just got to ask themselves whether this is the level of sacrifice and responsibility you want. And I'm really hoping that the next CEO of the company's already at the company, but 20 years from now, I hope I stay healthy and I hope I continue to earn my keep, but so long as I can do that, 20 years from now, I hope they're already here, but they have to earn it. For the next generation of leaders at Nvidia, what will their challenge look like? I don't know. And that's the beauty. In fact, that's the exactly the right answer. We should create the conditions by which the company continues to thrive, and we should create the conditions by which the leaders of our company continues to grow and that the next leader of the company is already at NVIDIA. That's my job is to create that condition. And just as I can be fired, the next CEO has to be hired. And I like it that way. I like that. I like that we can't be overly complacent about our position inside the company and that we can't take it for granted. And you're always vulnerable, you're always earning it, you're always striving to be better. That's a condition that's good.