Nvidia’s stock may be down, but the AI chipmaker’s CEO emphasized that demand for the company’s products is stronger than ever — and that high level of demand has him on edge.
“We have a lot of people on our shoulders, and everybody is counting on us,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference.
Huang was responding to a question about his biggest worry from Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. Nvidia is the third most valuable company in the world, after Apple and Microsoft.
“Demand is so great that delivery of our components, our technology, infrastructure, and software is really emotional for people,” Huang explained. “Because it directly affects their revenues, it directly affects their competitiveness.”
Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are the biggest buyers of Nvidia’s AI chips, constituting more than 40% of the company’s revenue.
Nvidia’s stock rallied 8% on Wednesday after Huang’s remarks and other AI chip manufacturers like Foxconn and TSMC gained too, at 5% and 4% respectively.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images
Nvidia has 70% to 95% of the AI chip market as of June, though competition is rising. Nvidia’s top rival, AMD, bought an AI startup for over half a million dollars in cash in July.
Huang justified the high price of Nvidia’s servers on Wednesday by saying that though the cost “could be a couple of million dollars per rack,” AI has the potential to replace older systems and drive cost savings.
Can AI Write Better Code Than Software Engineers?
Huang also addressed the issue of AI replacing software engineers when it comes to writing code.
“I think the days of every line of code being written by software engineers, those are completely over,” Huang said. “The idea that every one of our software engineers will essentially have companion digital engineers 24/7 — that’s the future.”
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garrman predicted the same future last month in a leaked conversation with employees. Garman said that AI would change the job description of software engineers and make it possible for them not to code at all.
Related: Amazon Cloud CEO Predicts a Future Where Most Software Engineers Don’t Code — and AI Does It Instead
Marco Argenti, the CIO of Goldman Sachs, said in April that technical skills alone couldn’t handle AI. He encouraged future software engineers to take philosophy classes in addition to their standard coursework.