Nvidia CEO’s bold prediction about Sam Altman, OpenAI sparks global debate

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is doubling down on his optimism for artificial intelligence (AI) at a time when even the technology’s biggest champions are sounding notes of caution.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have warned of an AI bubble, Huang insists the opposite.

According to Huang, OpenAI is poised to become the world’s next multitrillion-dollar hyperscale company.

Huang’s big statement

Speaking on a podcast hosted by Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner, Huang brushed off skepticism over AI’s overheated market.

“OpenAI is very likely going to be the world’s next multitrillion-dollar hyperscale company,” he stated.

His comments come as Altman himself warns of too much money flooding untested startups and Zuckerberg compares today’s infrastructure race to previous bubbles.

Why Huang disagrees

For Huang, the optimism is not rooted in hype but in what he describes as physics. 

“The future is accelerated computing and AI.” He outlined what he calls AI’s three “scaling laws,” pretraining, post-training, and inference, all of which increase demand for computing power.”

“The longer you think, the better the answer you get and thinking requires more compute,” he explained, arguing that everyday AI usage will keep fueling demand in ways past tech cycles never did.

The $100 billion bet

It is worth mentioning that Huang’s remarks came days after Nvidia announced a record $100 billion investment in OpenAI to back the company’s vast data centre expansion.

The deal underscores Nvidia’s so-called “circular financing” strategy: investing in customers who, in turn, spend billions on its GPUs.

To Huang, it’s less risk than opportunity. “If that’s the case, the opportunity to invest before they get there is one of the smartest investments we can imagine,” he said.

As doubts over AI valuations grow louder, Huang’s prediction puts him firmly at odds with other industry giants.

If OpenAI does become the first multitrillion-dollar AI company, both Huang and Nvidia could be remembered as the visionaries who bet big when others hesitated.