Front Bottom Line: Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang, in his role as the lead company behind the ongoing technology movement, says many people don’t realize how big the AI revolution is. He says there are currently more than 1.5 million AI models worldwide, from healthcare and drug discovery to more familiar names like Elon Musk’s Grok and Sam Altman’s ChatGPT.
Details: Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang has consistently framed AI as an infrastructure-scale transformation rather than a single technological breakthrough. In a conversation hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) with President and CEO Dr. John J. Hamre, Huang continued to lay out his layered vision of AI, highlighting the systems, capital and breadth of applications that underlie the technology’s long-term impact.
Building on earlier discussions of energy, chips and systems, Huang described the current construction of AI infrastructure as multi-layered. The first layer is simple: energy. Huang frames electricity storage as the most fundamental part of the entire AI revolution.
Next is Nvidia itself: Chips. Without chips, there is nothing to use the electricity and process the AI computation needed to run the AI models.
Huang then points to the third layer, which “includes financial services because it takes an enormous amount of capital to do what we do.” His remarks underscore that developing AI at scale is not only a technical challenge, but also a financial one, requiring sustained investment in long-lived data centers, networks and computing assets.
Huang then turned to the fourth layer that receives the most public attention: the models themselves. He acknowledged the importance of well-known systems, describing how “this is where people focus a lot when they talk about AI,” citing examples such as ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. However, he placed those systems in a much larger context, noting that “these are four of the one and a half million AI models in the world.” The statement recasts popular generative models as an incredibly small subset of a much larger and more diverse ecosystem. This statement diversifies the risk from larger and more widely known AI models and instead frames Nvidia as an infrastructure play within a technology revolution being implemented in every industry in the world.