Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said artificial intelligence will create jobs rather than eliminate them as the industry builds trillions of dollars in new infrastructure to support the technology.
Huang said AI is becoming a foundational technology similar to electricity and the internet, requiring large-scale facilities to manufacture chips, build computing systems and operate global data centres.
“We have only just begun this buildout. We are a few hundred billion dollars into it. Trillions of dollars of infrastructure still need to be built,”
Huang said.
He added that building and operating AI infrastructure will require a wide range of skilled workers including electricians, plumbers, steelworkers, network technicians and data centre operators.
“The labor required to support this buildout is enormous,”
Huang said.
Huang described the AI ecosystem as a “five-layer cake” consisting of energy supply, AI chips, computing infrastructure, AI models and applications built on top of the systems.
His comments come as several companies, including Block, Pinterest and Dow, have announced layoffs partly linked to efficiency gains from AI, while analysts at Goldman Sachs said the technology’s impact on employment so far has been visible but relatively modest.