Before the bottom line: Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang, in his role as the primary company leader behind the ongoing technology movement, says many people don’t realize how big the AI revolution is. He says there are currently more than 1.5 million AI models worldwide, from healthcare and drug discovery to common names like Elon Musk’s Grok and Sam Altman’s ChatGPT.
Details: Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang continues to frame artificial intelligence as an infrastructure-scale transformation rather than a single technological breakthrough. Dr. President and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). In a fireside chat with John Jay Hamre, Huang continued his layered view of AI, emphasizing the breadth of systems, capital and applications that underpin the technology’s long-term impact.
Building on earlier discussions of energy, chips, and systems, Huang described AI’s current infrastructure build as multi-layered. The first layer is simple: energy. Huang frames power generation as the most fundamental part of the entire AI revolution.
Next is Nvidia itself: the chips. Without the chips, there is nothing to use electricity and do the AI compute processing needed to run AI models.
Huang then highlights the third layer, which “includes financial services, because everything we do requires a large amount of capital.” His remarks highlight that AI development at scale is not only a technical challenge, but also a financial one, requiring sustained investment in data centers, networking, and long-term computing assets.
Huang then turned to the fourth layer that receives the most public attention: the models themselves. He acknowledged the prominence of well-known systems, citing examples like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok, describing it as “a huge focus in this space when people talk about AI.” However, he put those systems in a much broader context, saying, “They are four out of a million and a half AI models in the world.” The statement reframes popular generative models as an incredibly small subset of a much larger and more diverse ecosystem. This statement shifts the risk away from larger, more widely known AI models, and instead frames Nvidia as an infrastructure play in the midst of a technological revolution that is being implemented in every industry in the world.
