Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the semiconductor boom tied to artificial intelligence has years left to run and that the chip industry must expand fivefold to tenfold over the next decade to meet demand.
In an interview published on July 25, Huang told Axios co-founder Mike Allen that a bust in the chip sector was not near. “No, not for a while,” Huang said when asked whether the industry was due for a downturn.
Huang also embraced the phrase “this time is different,” which investors often associate with past market bubbles. He said the current wave of demand was not consumer-led but “industrially driven,” adding that “the fundamental technology of computers is changing.”
Huang said the world needs a new layer of computing infrastructure dedicated to AI. He said limits on chips, power, land and construction labor were helping restrain overbuilding that often comes before a downturn.
“We basically are constrained in every single direction, in every single way,” Huang said. “That constraint is what holds the system back.”
Huang said a bust would eventually come, but not soon. He has previously projected that global AI infrastructure investment could reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion a year by the end of the decade.
The interview followed Huang’s visit to Tokyo, where Nvidia announced partnerships with Fujitsu, Toyota, Fanuc, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Kioxia to deploy what the company calls “physical AI” in robots and factory systems.
Huang said Japan was a natural fit for physical AI because of its manufacturing base. He said Nvidia plans to build a Vera Rubin AI factory in Japan with 140 megawatts of computing power by 2028.
The collaboration with Fujitsu and other robotics companies aims to combine Japan’s mechatronics expertise with Nvidia’s AI platforms for factories and autonomous robots, according to the source material.
Chip stocks have sold off in recent weeks amid skepticism about whether heavy AI spending can be sustained. Hyperscalers including Alphabet have posted negative free cash flow as they tap bond markets to fund infrastructure buildouts, and Huang dismissed concern that customers were borrowing to buy Nvidia chips.
He said the spending reflected a permanent change in computing rather than cyclical demand.
