Just a few short years ago, AI was a novel concept generating uncanny, sloppy photos and videos that appeared across your social media feeds. Today, it’s seemingly ubiquitous. New models are popping up almost every month. There’s AI integration in pockets of Hollywood. And even if it’s so far failing to boost your productivity at the office, AI has most likely already appeared in your workplace. That sprawling expansion requires enormous infrastructure investment. And Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company is expecting to deliver those building blocks at a massive scale.
During his keynote address Monday at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose, Huang said the company doubled its demand forecast within the next year. “I see through 2027 at least $1 trillion,” he said. “In fact, we are going to be short. I am certain computing demand will be much higher than that.”
And he’s already preparing for that reality with an unusual incentive to attract top talent and wring more computing power from his workforce: offering engineers AI tokens worth nearly half their salary.
The AI boom is pushing infrastructure investments to new heights. Tech companies are investing a staggering $700 billion into the data center buildout, a sum that rivals the GDP of developed economies like Sweden, and is more than double the total inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo missions—projects that sent humans to the moon. Nvidia is a critical supplier in that buildout, providing the processors that power AI factories. The $1 trillion demand figure is further proof that the buildout is all gas, no brakes, even as competitors like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) struggle to close the gap. All of this comes despite looming fears of an AI bubble, as flagged by business leaders like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and “Big Short” investor Michael Burry.
