Chapel Hill, North Carolina — Countries need to develop their own artificial intelligence capacity and decide which parts of the rapidly growing AI ecosystem they want to build domestically, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said.
Speaking during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Huang compared AI infrastructure to essential national systems such as water, roads, electricity and the internet.
“Every single country needs to build infrastructure so that you could support your own local economy,” Huang said.
“It becomes the capacity, the intellectual capacity, the digital intellectual capacity for you to support your researchers and students and society and industries and startups,” he added.
Huang described AI as a “five-layer cake,” with energy at the base. Chips make up the second layer, followed by infrastructure such as data centers, land and power. AI models form the fourth layer, while data and applications make up the fifth and most important layer.
“Every single region, every single country should decide which one of the layers they want to invest in,” Huang said. “You don’t have to win in every single one of them. You don’t have to develop all of them.”
He said countries should focus on spreading AI adoption across their economies, including in education, healthcare, manufacturing and scientific research.
Huang added that AI is not limited to language and can be used to learn, understand and predict information in structured fields such as biology, chemistry and physics.
Countries can also build on existing areas of expertise by directing AI investment toward sectors where they already have strengths, he said.
“The United States is going to lead in the development of AI across these five-layer stacks, but we’d love to partner with everybody so that everybody could take advantage of this,” Huang said.
He also urged governments and companies to combine commercially available AI tools with systems developed for their own specific needs.
“You should use AI off-the-shelf wherever you can, but don’t forget, you have to invest in building your own intelligence, every country, every company,” Huang said.
“You can’t outsource all of your intelligence to somebody else. And so you have to use as much of it as you can, build as much as you need to.”
Huang said building local infrastructure can quickly empower researchers and startups by giving them access to the computing resources needed to develop products and conduct advanced research.
Lutnick said governments must invest in data centers and related infrastructure if they want their citizens and economies to fully benefit from AI.
“They’ve got to make that infrastructure investment. They’ve got to build the data centers. They’ve got to harness the AI for themselves,” Lutnick said.
India launched the IndiaAI Mission in 2024 to expand access to computing resources, strengthen domestic AI capabilities and support startups, datasets and skills development. The government approved more than Rs 10,000 crore for the program, including plans for shared computing infrastructure for researchers and developers. (Source: IANS)
