Clad in his trademark leather jacket, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage yesterday at San Jose’s SAP Center before nearly 20,000 people at the company’s annual GTC conference, known in recent years as the Super Bowl of AI.
Once again, Huang essentially declared a blowout, forecasting a staggering $1 trillion in orders for Nvidia’s most sophisticated AI chips through 2027, driven by the explosion of AI infrastructure now being built around the world.
Yet for someone whose company has become the world’s most valuable—with a roughly $4 trillion market cap—by powering the global AI buildout, Huang has somehow avoided the kind of public criticism that has been leveled at other prominent AI CEOs.
It takes only a cursory glance at social media to find posts calling OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “evil,” while companies like Anthropic, Meta, and Google increasingly face criticism over AI’s risks—from job losses and copyright lawsuits to misinformation and the growing push to deploy AI in military systems.
Nvidia’s CEO, by contrast, remains largely celebrated as the engineer-builder behind the boom. That’s been true even though the massive AI data centers now rising across the country and generating a good deal of local opposition are packed with Nvidia chips.
In fact, every major move in AI—from chatbots and agents to applications in the workplace, schools, and the military—runs on Nvidia hardware, software, and systems. Nvidia has also invested billions to support the AI ecosystem, partnering with both OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as funding data center companies and AI startups.
So why isn’t Huang—and Nvidia as a whole—a target of the AI backlash?
The answer is that the companies supplying the “picks and shovels” of technological booms rarely attract the same scrutiny as the miners. Oil companies drew criticism during the fossil fuel era, not the manufacturers of drilling equipment. Railroad barons faced public backlash, not the companies supplying steel rails. And in the internet era, cloud providers like Amazon Web Services powered companies such as Airbnb and Uber that reshaped entire industries—yet the criticism largely focused on the platforms, not the infrastructure behind them.
Still, Nvidia made it clear at GTC that it is positioning itself not just as a chipmaker but as the provider of entire AI computing systems powering the new “inference” phase of AI. (Inference is about powering AI outputs, not just training, and it will require an enormous new round of infrastructure investment.) That ambition goes beyond Nvidia’s traditional “picks and shovels” role. These days, Nvidia is increasingly trying to control the entire swath of systems, software and platforms that power the AI economy.
