Ahead of his visit to India later this month, the founder of the world’s most valuable company was emphatic that India needs its own artificial intelligence (AI) model and that AI will only create huge amounts of jobs in the country, just like the advent of the internet did.
Jensen Huang, the billionaire CEO and founder of Nvidia, the richest company in the world that makes the chips powering the AI wave, tried to dispel the notion they AI was going to take away jobs, arguing that not only was AI going to spawn jobs, it was absolutely essential for India’s progress that it developed its own AI models.
AI is infrastructure, just like water, electricity and roads, Huang said. “AI doesn’t have to be fundamentally invented in India, but it has to be developed, fine tuned, and continuously enhanced in India. The companies of India needs AI infrastructure. India has its own electricity, India has your own roads. Of course, you need to have your own AI!”
“The IT services industry of India, unquestionably will be reinvented for the AI era,” Hansen said at a select media round table THE WEEK was invited to attend ahead of his upcoming India visit and meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Dassault Systeme’s 3D Experience World event in Houston, US.
“Instead of developing and maintaining software in the back rooms of IT departments, it is very likely that the AI IT industry will become service providers, service developers of agentic AI systems to help companies around the world automate their workflow, become more productive, move faster. (Thus) the reinvention, the reskilling of the IT industry in India will also happen.”
“We have a giant investment in India,” Hansen said, referring to Nvidia’s $850 million investment in India in November. “I prefer India not only welcome data centres but also build data centres by Indian companies.”
“Think about the upstream as well as the downstream jobs that will be created!”, he said, adding, “AI will create jobs in India, (just like) the (huge) amount of jobs that Internet has created in India.”
Nvidia powered past Apple and Microsoft to become the richest publicly traded company in the world, even crossing an eye-popping value of more than $5 trillion, late last year (it is presently valued at $4.38 trillion). Hansen’s visit to the India AI Summit is expected to give a fillip to India’s own ambitions in the AI space.