Bottom line on the front: Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang, in his role as the primary company leader 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 better-known names like Elon Musk’s Grok and Sam Altman’s ChatGPT.
The details: Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang has consistently framed artificial intelligence as an infrastructure-scale transformation rather than a single technological breakthrough. In a fireside chat hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) with President and CEO Dr. John J. Hamre, Huang went on to describe his layered view of AI, emphasizing the systems, capital, and breadth of applications that underpin the technology’s long-term impact.
Building on an earlier discussion about power, chips and systems, Huang described the current AI infrastructure build as multi-layered. The first layer is simple: energy. Huang frames the building of electricity 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 highlights the third layer, which “includes financial services, because it requires an enormous amount of capital to do what we do.” His remarks highlight that developing AI at scale is not only a technical challenge, but also a financial one, requiring sustained investment in data centers, networking, and long-lasting computing assets.
Huang then turned to the fourth layer that receives the most public attention: the models themselves. He acknowledged the prominence of well-known systems, describing how “this is where people mostly focus on when they talk about AI,” citing examples such as ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. However, he put those systems in a much broader context, pointing out that “those are four of the million and a half AI models in the world.” The statement frames popular generative models as an incredibly small subset of a much larger and more diverse ecosystem. This statement diversifies the risk away from the larger and more widely known AI models, and instead frames Nvidia as an infrastructure play amid a technological revolution that is being implemented in every industry in the world.