AFP|Published
Artificial intelligence will ultimately become a key aspect of all companies, the head of AI chip giant Nvidia said during a visit to Stockholm, where he urged Europe to ramp up its AI industry.
"Every single company will be an AI company eventually. Every single industry will be impacted by AI," Jensen Huang told an event late Thursday, part of a European tour that includes a Nvidia-hosted conference in Berlin next week.
"The important thing for us is to recognise that Europe needs to build out the entire stack," he said, referring to the AI technology chain from data centres to chatbots and other apps.
Speaking later to AFP, Huang said his company had invested $8 billion in Europe over the past year.
AI ecosystem
"We've strategically invested in different parts of that ecosystem, really high-quality companies that we believe could help lift it, the whole ecosystem in Europe," he said, citing the British data centre and AI cloud provider Nscale and the Dutch cloud provider Nebius as examples.
"In the last one year, we've invested $8 billion already. We have another couple of billion dollars in the pipeline," he added. "We're helping Europe create the AI ecosystem."
Huang was in Stockholm for the launch of Sferical One, a Swedish supercomputer using Nvidia chips that will keep sensitive Swedish data and expertise in the country.
During his visit, Volvo Cars also announced it was expanding its partnership with Nvidia to improve safety technology in its planned self-driving vehicles.
'Most consequential change' in our lifetime
US Federal Reserve boss Kevin Warsh said Friday that AI technology was the "most consequential change" to the global economy he had seen, predicting its effects would be positive but the path forward would be "bumpy".
"I'd say the advent of this new technology is probably the most consequential change to the US and the global economy in my lifetime," he told an event at the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok.
Warsh said he takes the macroeconomic implications of the technology - including a short-term driving of inflation through demand-side effects and an expected positive supply-side shock in the long term - "soberly, responsibly" in his role as head of the US central bank.
He conceded that the AI investment boom would drive prices up in the short term, but "there really is, I think, a huge benefit to the global economy, to the US economy over the horizon".
He said he expected the Fed to use AI to be able to better analyse data in its conduct of monetary policy, as an example of the positive effects.
He also reiterated his previously stated belief that the technology would "make economies and countries that put it to good use more productive".
He cautioned, however, that the path forward was still laced with uncertainty about how markets would evolve around the technology.
"The path from where we are to there is likely to be a very bumpy one, bumpy in our understanding of the technology, bumpy because we really don't know what the market structure is going to be of these new technologies," he said.
AFP