Gaming: Jensen Huang Talks Ai's Insatiable Appetite For Gpus At The World...

Jensen Huang has well and truly escaped gaming obscurity these days. The Nvidia CEO just took the stage at the World Economic Forum to talk about AI demand, bubbles, and the impact that artificial intelligence has on the job market now and into the future. Of course, being the man in charge of shipping billions of dollars of AI chips, he has a particularly positive take on the lot.

Chatting to Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, who called Nvidia 'nuh-vidia' throughout the conversation, Huang had a few things to say about his booming business.

"One good test on the AI bubble is to recognize that Nvidia now has now millions of Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. We're in every cloud. You know. We're used everywhere.

"And if you try to rent an Nvidia GPU these days, it's so incredibly hard, and the spot price of GPU rentals is going up, not just the latest generation, but two generation old GPUs. The spot price of rentals are going up, and the reason for that is because the number of AI companies that are being created, the number of companies shifting their R&D budget."

Nvidia's datacentre business, the topic of conversation here, has soared to many times its gaming revenue in recent years. It hit a record $51.2 billion through August to September last year. Gaming revenue during the same period was $4.3 billion. Though the demand for datacentre GPUs, such as upcoming Rubin chips, B100/200, and older chips like the H100/H200, do have a knock-on effect in gaming GPUs.

Just look to the price of the RTX 5090—a more than capable card for smaller-scale AI deployment—which launched at $1,999 and is now selling for around $4,000+.

Capacity for production is one factor in all of this, as when AI comes knocking for chips, be those GPUs or memory, there's only so much readily available at any one time. That's why we're seeing RAM prices skyrocket: AI demand outstrips supply and datacenter buildout is more valuable than availability for consumers.

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In Huang's words, the fervour to buy more AI chips is "the largest infrastructure build out in human history."

"That's going to create a lot of jobs," he says, citing skilled labor requirements for building out massive datacenters and increasing energy output to meet their demands.

Source: PC Gamer