AI exports bigger opportunity for India than chips, says Nvidia’s Huang

Mumbai: India should focus more on developing local infrastructure and capabilities for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) than manufacturing semiconductors that power the AI revolution, according to Jensen Huang, the founder and chief of Nvidia.

“Remember, other countries have been manufacturing chips…for a long time,” Huang said during his visit to the city on Thursday for the Nvidia AI Summit. “No one manufactures intelligence at the moment. Before every other country jumps into that, India should jump into it.”

The technology icon, who has risen to global prominence in the past couple of years, advocated for India to leverage the local software skill to shift from being a back-office handling coding for global firms to exporting AI products.

“It's such a cousin; it's such a close relationship from the IT industry. It's so close, why go too far away?” Huang said, calling AI export a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.

India also has the vast amounts of data to train AI models and the renewable energy to power the computation infrastructure, he said.

“The future, I believe, is going to be India developing AI and the AI is exported,” Huang said. “When you do that, India will be a gigantic business opportunity for us.”

'AI won’t take your job'

Dressed in his usual all-black attire including the signature leather jacket, Huang managed to fill a hall as big as a football pitch with attendees, who listened spell-bound as he shared his insights on artificial intelligence.

“AI has no possibility of doing everything we do. But it can do 20% of our jobs 1,000 times better. So, everyone should use AI for that 20%,” he said in response to a question from Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar.

“AI will not take your job. The person who uses AI is going to take your job,” said Huang, using his catchphrases—his energy and humour on stage masking his fatigue after pit-stops in Florida and Copenhagen on his way to Mumbai from California, all in three days.

Moore’s Law, a popular observation in the technology industry, says that the number of transistors that can be fitted on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. More transistors mean more computing power.

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Huang said that computer hardware technology today has reached its limit in terms of how many transistors can be crammed into a chip, and by extension how powerful processors can be.

“We can no longer afford to do nothing in software and expect to improve computing experience,” he said. “We started our company to improve software.”

Nvidia makes high-end graphics processing units (GPU) that coupled with the firm’s CUDA software handle multiple simpler tasks simultaneously rather than handling complex calculations that conventional processors do. Each year, the computation power of these GPUs grows by a factor of 4, Huang said, outpacing Moore’s Law.

These GPUs, which first revolutionized the gaming industry, are now touted to become the backbone of the AI revolution. Nvidia’s latest Hopper GPU and upcoming Blackwell GPU are the building blocks of large servers that handle the computation for AI.

To be sure, just a month before OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the first mainstream generative AI application based on Nvidia’s chips, was launched, Nvidia was worth $275 billion. In 24 months since then, its market cap has soared over 12x. The unprecedented surge catapulted the chipmaker ahead of Elon Musk’s Tesla to the second most valuable in the world. Nvidia’s valuation at $3.4 billion isjust behind Apple’s $3.5 billion as of Thursday.

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The rally has also made Huang one of the richest individuals on the planet, with a net worth of $122 billion on Thursday, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

While Nvidia and Huang’s leather jacket were revered symbols in the gaming industry for over three decades, the AI euphoria has turned them into global icons. Though gamers often rue the constricted availability of graphics cards for PCs, Nvidia and Huang would certainly not be complaining.

Next-gen gaming

Huang expects generative AI to revolutionize the next generation of video games. With AI, developers can generate realistic landscapes, characters, and objects at a lower cost. AI-powered chatbots will enable characters to engage in dynamic conversations, develop their own backstories, and recognize individual players. This will create an immersive gaming experience, where players interact with smart, responsive characters in vibrant, AI-crafted worlds.

Huang said India's gaming industry has a tremendous potential, but its growth hinges on increasing accessibility. “For the gaming industry to truly take off in India, we need to bridge the broadband gap,” he said. But he expressed optimism, citing progress in delivering wireless broadband to every home.

While a third of Nvidia’s talent pool is based in India, Huang highlighted the country does not contribute much to the company’s revenue. The trend is endemic to the technology industry, with many global tech giants having large workforces in India but relatively little revenue.

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According to Jayanth Kolla, co-founder of tech consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst, that may change for Nvidia.

“The growth of data centres in India will be inevitable, and in this growth, a proliferation of data centres will take place across smaller cities beyond the current hubs—as we continue to use more and more data,” Kolla said. “This gives Nvidia practically an endless market to keep addressing, because in the long run, the applicability of AI is only going to proliferate across more and more applications behind. Huang, thus, will continue to draw the kind of hype that he’s seeing in India currently.”

Huang also sees an increasing role for AI in cybersecurity. Organizations today deal with large sets of sensitive data which are either proprietary or the intellectual properties of clients.

“For cybersecurity, our single greatest contribution is creating technology every cyber security company can use,” Huang said, explaining how Nvidia's AI and computing technology is used by cyber tech companies to build firewalls. Another use case of AI is to systematically go through all cyber warnings to segregate the false threats quicker “to balance between cautiousness and generating too much data can overwhelm the IT group”.

He repeatedly emphasised that it is important to develop AI technology “safely”.

Shouvik Das contributed to this story.