AI infra race reshapes nations: NVIDIA CEO

AI infra race reshapes nations: NVIDIA CEO

Washington, Feb 26 (IANS) NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang said the global artificial intelligence boom has entered a decisive phase, declaring that computing power now directly drives revenue growth and national competitiveness.

“In this new world of AI, compute equals revenues,” Huang said Wednesday (local time) during the company’s earnings call. “Without compute, there is no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there is no way to grow revenues.”

He said architecture decisions have become central to business outcomes. “Architecture is incredibly important. It is more than strategic now. It directly affects their earnings,” Huang said. “Choosing the right architecture, the one with the best performance per watt, is literally everything,” he told the investors.

Huang stressed that AI infrastructure is becoming a national priority. “Every country will build and operate some parts of its AI infrastructure just like with electricity and the Internet today,” he said, underscoring the rise of sovereign AI systems.

Chief financial officer Colette Kress said Nvidia’s “Sovereign AI business more than tripled year over year to over $30 billion,” driven by customers in “Canada, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the UK.”

The company reported total quarterly revenue of $68 billion, up 73 per cent year on year. Data centre revenue reached $62 billion, up 75 per cent. For the full fiscal year, data centre revenue totalled $194 billion, up 68 per cent.

NVIDIA also projected first-quarter revenue of $78 billion, plus or minus 2 per cent, with most growth expected to come from data centres.

Huang highlighted deepening partnerships with leading AI firms. “This quarter, we announced a partnership with Anthropic and a $10 billion investment in their company,” he said.

He described Anthropic’s “Claude Cowork agent platform” as “revolutionary” and added, “Between Claude Cowork and OpenAI, compute demand is skyrocketing, and the ChatGPT moment of agentic AI has arrived.”

He said Nvidia recently celebrated OpenAI’s launch of “GPT-5.3 Codex,” which was “trained with and inferencing on Grace Blackwell and NVLink 72 systems.” He added, “We continue to work with OpenAI toward a partnership agreement and believe we are close.”

On China, Kress said, “While small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers were approved by the US government, we have yet to generate any revenue, and we do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China.” She added the company was “not assuming any Data Centre compute revenue from China in our outlook.”

--IANS

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