Feed me GPUs

Nvidia's CEO says that every country needs a 'sovereign AI'. It's unclear what this implies.

An AI ravenously consuming all the GPUs It can get Its hands on.

Incentives drive outcomes, and if you’re Nvidia’s CEO, your incentive is to foment as much demand for your company’s GPUs as possible. And it’s for this reason that Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, made the improbable claim at a conference in Dubai, that each country needs its own ‘sovereign AI’.

Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees Monday at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

Huang, who spoke as part of a fireside chat with the UAE’s Minister of AI, His Excellency Omar Al Olama, described sovereign AI — which emphasizes a country’s ownership over its data and the intelligence it produces — as an enormous opportunity for the world’s leaders.

“It codifies your culture, your society’s intelligence, your common sense, your history – you own your own data,” Huang told Al Olama during their conversation, a highlight of an event attended by more than 4,000 delegates from 150 countries.

There are something like 195 countries in the world—that’s a lot of GPUs to sell! Never mind that some countries are very small, like Andorra or Nieu. If it’s a country, it needs its own sovereign AI! Never mind that it isn’t clear what ‘sovereign AI’ would do for an Andorra or a Nieu.

More seriously, it is clear that AI will have significant national security implications for countries. This is especially the case for the largest countries and their allies. Maybe Huang’s comments were an inept way of suggesting that countries ought to figure out how AI affects their national security. But that’s not a sexy headline, and it doesn’t necessarily translate into more GPU sales for Nvidia.