Clad in his trademark leather jacket, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage yesterday at San Jose’s SAP Center before nearly 20,000 people at the company’s annual GTC conference, known in recent years as the Super Bowl of AI.
Once again, Huang essentially declared a blowout, forecasting a staggering $1 trillion in orders for Nvidia’s most sophisticated AI chips through 2027, driven by the explosion of AI infrastructure now being built around the world.
Yet for someone whose company has become the world’s most valuable—with a roughly $4 trillion market cap—by powering the global AI buildout, Huang has somehow avoided the kind of public criticism that has been leveled at other prominent AI CEOs.
It takes only a cursory glance at social media to find posts calling OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “evil,” while companies like Anthropic, Meta, and Google increasingly face criticism over AI’s risks—from job losses and copyright lawsuits to misinformation and the growing push to deploy AI in military systems.
Nvidia’s CEO, by contrast, remains largely celebrated as the engineer-builder behind the boom. That’s been true even though the massive AI data centers now rising across the country and generating a good deal of local opposition are packed with Nvidia chips.
