Nvidia founder, CEO and tireless fan Jensen Huang told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference on Thursday why his company’s AI dominance (and revenue) will continue its unprecedented growth streak through the end of next year.
He can see the future.
There has been endless doubt about whether Nvidia’s party will end as it faces increasing competition for GPUs and AI chips from all directions: the hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google, each building their own) and AI labs (Anthropic and OpenAI, which are building their own), as well as from Cerebras, new public competitor and startups like recorded.
“Most people think Nvidia builds a chip. I mean, it takes airplanes to ship what we build,” Huang said, adding that the company continues to fight a perception of its beginnings. Nvidia invented the GPU, which was then largely sold to consumers to enhance PC gaming. “A GPU isn’t $399 now. It’s $8.5 million dollars. That’s one GPU, all connected with NVLink, 2 million pieces, right? 250,000 kilowatts. That’s one GPU, and we ship thousands of them.”
He added that orders for a single product, a computer system which combines 36 Grace CPUs with 72 Blackwell GPUs, is currently experiencing 27% monthly sales growth.
However, Huang did not limit his bullish view to current sales. He took the opportunity to reiterate Nvidia’s revenue outlook for next year, guiding the company. provided last month when it reported another quarter of record revenue. That’s when he first said revenue could grow 70% next year.
“I think we could grow 70% year on year. We are confident about that,” Huang said again on Thursday. Analysts expect the company to end its current fiscal year with revenue of about $400 billion. So 70% growth would mean around $680 billion next year.
Huang explained why he’s confident: his company is so integrated in all areas of AI that he believes he can see the future.
“Nvidia runs all models. Every lab can use us,” the CEO said, mentioning that this includes models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, as well as open weight offerings. “We are a fundamental platform of the AI ecosystem, a fundamental platform of the AI industry.”
Nvidia’s fingers extend from its suppliers, such as memory chip makers, to data center projects and startups.
“We’re tracking every gigawatt of land, energy and deposits around the world. Literally everything on the planet,” he said. (“Shell” refers to the structure of a data center building before it is equipped with computers.)
“I mean, just think about all my partners. How many neoclouds report to us? How many OEMs report to us? How many clouds report to us? How many AI-native companies report to us? We’re working with everyone, so we know where everything is,” he said.
That comment raised inevitable questions about Nvidia’s so-called circular deals, in which it invests in companies that turn around and buy its products. These schemes are known to have contributed to the downfall of an earlier generation of Internet development providers. like lucent technologies.
Huang had a simple, yet cheeky, response. “Well, it’s not circular because we invested a little money and we got a lot of money back.” He continued jokingly: “I look at the spreadsheet, we put in $1 and $100 comes back. Is that circular? If so, let’s do more of that.”
Jokes aside, he insisted that before any of these companies get investment, Nvidia makes sure it has real contracts that generate revenue from customers. In total, he said he has seen such contracts worth $100 billion: “I’m not taking any risk… I need something certain.”
Time will tell whether Nvidia’s strength in AI can really persist in the long term. If there’s one golden rule of the tech industry, it’s that all important things get disrupted. Right now, even Huang admits that much of the growth in AI is coming from native AI startups that are raising large sums and spending most of that money on their own use of AI. As the AI industry matures, companies are expected to become more efficient in how they use infrastructure and tokens.
But for now, Nvidia has its finger in every pie and sees another year of plenty ahead.
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