Nvidia / Benj Edwards
On Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that each country should control its own AI infrastructure to protect its own culture. He dubbed the concept “Sovereign AI”, which an Nvidia blog post described as each country’s “product of its own intelligence”.
Huang made the announcement in a conversation with UAE Minister of AI Omar Al Ulama during the World Governments Summit in Dubai. “It compiles your culture, your society’s intelligence, your intellect, your history — you own your data,” Huang told Al Ulama.
The World Organization of Governments describes itself as “a global, non-partisan, not-for-profit organization dedicated to shaping the future of governments”. According to Nvidia, its annual event attracts more than 4,000 delegates from 150 countries. It is hosted in the United Arab Emirates, a collection of autocratic monarchies with no democratically elected institutions.
During a discussion with Al Ulama, Huang recommended customizing AI models to each country’s needs. When asked what he would do if he were the leader of a developing nation, Huang said, “The first thing I would do, of course, is to model the language, the data of your culture, into your own big language model. I’ll codify.”
He also said that Nvidia has “democratized” AI by creating a common platform with its Nvidia GPUs. And he said tomorrow’s kids probably don’t need to study computer science because “it’s our job to create computing technologies that nobody has to program and that programming language is human. Everyone in the world is a programmer now.”
Nvidia is best known for developing powerful GPU chips that accelerate the training and running of AI models, currently deployed in data centers used by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. Demand for Nvidia’s chips has led to massive financial success for the company over the past year.
For Huang and Nvidia, the idea of each nation owning its own AI infrastructure is easy because it would mean the market for its AI-accelerating hardware products would expand to every country in the world. As the tech industry is likely at the beginning of the adoption curve for deep learning AI applications, this could result in dramatic growth for Nvidia in the near future.
Relatedly, Nvidia’s market capitalization once again overtook Amazon’s market capitalization on Monday, making the two companies tied for the fourth most valuable company in the U.S., the parent of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. are behind the alphabet. Reuters reported that when Nvidia first overtook Amazon, it had a stock value of $734.96 per share on Monday morning, giving Nvidia a market value of $1.82 trillion compared to $1.81 trillion for Amazon. As of this writing, the two companies are still close in value, with Nvidia again in the lead.