Jensen Huang, the CEO of the world’s third-most valued company, has been on a side quest to spread one meaningful message: Every nation, regardless of its size or resources, must develop its own ‘sovereign AI’.
The man in black has travelled over a dozen geographies, right from the Indian subcontinent to his latest stop, the UAE, for the recent World Government Summit in Dubai.
As Huang envisions it, sovereign AI isn’t just about having some fancy algorithms humming away in a server room. It’s about a fundamental shift in power, reclaiming national autonomy in generative AI. It’s about ensuring that the decisions made by AI, which will increasingly impact everything from healthcare to defence, reflect the priorities of each individual nation.
Huang is basically helping countries take control of how they can shape and build AI to fit their needs. To make sure that when AI makes decisions about things like healthcare and defence, those decisions match the values and priorities of each country. He believes AI could change not just how we live but also the character of different nations.
Money Matters
The trillion-dollar company offering graphic and digital media processors has clearly outlined plans to invest in and scale the operations of the countries Huang is visiting. Last year, NVIDIA signed several deals with those states.
In India, the company has joined hands with national conglomerates Reliance and Tata Group to build AI computing infrastructure and platforms powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India today. Interestingly, both the partnerships were announced on the same day.
Reliance will be provided with the latest tech to further develop the local infrastructure. On the other hand, TCS will upskill its 600,000-strong workforce apart from the technical aspect of the partnership. Huang’s efforts show that the AI visionary wants to help countries worldwide develop AI at the grassroot levels.
Even when he met Omar Al Olama, the Middle Eastern state’s minister of AI, Huang focused on explaining how AI can be trained on local data to protect cultural identities. “It’s not that costly; it is also not that hard,” Huang said. “The first thing that I would do, of course, is codify the language – the data of your culture into your own large language model.”
Over the past six months, the chief of the most powerful company in tech right now has also visited Canada, France, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam distributing similar wise words. By building locally (with NVIDIA), these nations can boost their economies while ensuring national security.
Empowering Competition
Huang’s message resonates with world leaders since large language models and other recent AI developments have kickstarted a competition not just among tech companies, but also nations. China has been ambitiously open-sourcing its contenders, India is going all in, and UAE is betting big on generative AI, too.
Other leaders in the field, too, are noticing the stark difference between generative AI and the technologies that prevailed earlier. “The thing that’s different this time”, continued Sri Elaprolu, global head of AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, “is that it has started to be hot across and not just one active geography. We’re supporting customers across all areas, including Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East — locations we normally don’t see a jump right into emerging tech.”
From nations large to small, Huang, the Midas of AI, is making sure no one is left untouched by his golden touch. His call is not merely a suggestion, but has a greater purpose of building technology from scratch without anyone being left behind.
We have seen technologies in the past get easily monopolised, causing economic disparity and even putting the security of nations at risk. But Huang wants to lay a better foundation for generative AI and is clearly (and literally) going miles to do so.
Where do you think Huang is headed next to spread the word about sovereign AI?
