Asked how central NVIDIA is to the financing of the AI industry, Megan McCarty Carino describes NVIDIA as both supplier and investor to its own customers. That is why its CEO leaving matters beyond the company.
…to say true there. You know, most of the sort of breakthroughs in AI that we have seen leading up to this AI moment that we're in have been reliant on computing power, you know, make the models bigger, give them more computing power. And that computing power is coming overwhelmingly from NVIDIA.
A large part of what's going on in AI, the AI industry, the AI economy generally, is financing, right? These guys are borrowing and spending hundreds of billions of dollars. NVIDIA is at the center of that too.
That's right. So, you know, we talk a lot on the show about circular financing, this sort of web of interdependencies in AI. NVIDIA is at the center of that web. It has all these little, you know, nodes coming out from it. It has taken major equity stakes in AI companies to which it also sells chips, OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic. It also operates a big venture capital arm that provides seed funding for startups, many of which also rent or buy its chips. It's also a major investor in the kind of AI infrastructure supply chain. So yeah, very central role there in terms of the finance.
Jensen Huang has his leather jackets. He's got the sneakers, I think, that he wears. The comparisons, of course, are made to Steve Jobs and Jobs as a salesman for computers and Apple specifically. Huang played that role like for the entire industry, yeah?
Yeah, you know, I think Jensen has sort of been seen as one of the most sort of forceful and convincing voices for what you might consider like a positive normal vision of AI progress, which I think stands kind of in really stark contrast to some of the stuff that we hear from the leaders of…
Have you been out and about today? Did you go to the store? Did you run to Starbucks or whatever?