Nvidia's CEO chats about the future of AI: 'We're going to need three computers... one to create the AI… one to simulate the AI… and one to run the AI'

YouTube YouTube
Watch On

At this year's Siggraph event, Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang sat down with Wired for an hour-long chat about all things Nvidia, RTX, and AI. Among the varied topics touched upon, including a recognition that AI training and inference have huge energy demands, was Huang's assertion that more computers are going to be needed for AI systems in the future—specifically, three times more.

Siggraph is an annual conference normally about computer graphics and technology involved with interactivity (think AR and VR, that kind of thing) but it was only a matter of time before AI would become the main topic of discussion. To that end, Nvidia's CEO was interviewed by Wired's Lauren Goode for an hour-long streamed discussion that covered GPUs, RTX, and ray tracing, but mostly AI.

If you've been keeping up to date with Nvidia's push for generative AI to be everywhere, then there's nothing in the discussion that will really pique your interest. However, at one point, Huang mentioned how the world of AI is now moving away from its pioneering phase and moving toward the next one, which Nvidia's CEO called the "enterprise wave."

After that comes the "physical wave", which, according to Huang, is "really, really quite extraordinary." He clarified that statement by saying three computers will be required: one computer to create the AI, another to simulate and refine the AI, and finally a third computer to run the AI itself.

"It's a three computer problem. You know, a three body problem and it's so incredibly complicated and we created three computers to do that."

Jen-Hsun is, of course, talking about Nvidia's raft of hardware and software packages, from its DGX H100 servers to create the AI, Jetsen embedded computers to simulate the AI, and then workstations and servers using Omniverse and RTX GPUs to run the AI.

Siggraph is one of my favourite tech events and I've been watching presentations and reading research papers presented at the conference for years. I have to say that it's a bit of shame that Nvidia's fairly blatant sales pitch for its AI systems took center stage this year—Huang's chat with Meta's Mark Zuckerberg was another example of AI-promotion with no substance—and although there will still be plenty of discussion about computer graphics, and AI will naturally be a part of that, Huang didn't say anything that made me think "Wow, this is going to be so cool!"

Are we really going to need three computers? PC gamers certainly won't and neither will most businesses. Even those looking to really integrate AI into their core operations may baulk at the potential cost and complexity of using and paying for three tiers of Nvidia's products.

Nvidia is clearly 100% focused on AI now. The days of it just being a graphics/gaming-only company are long gone, despite it being a core part of the business when it morphed into a data-processing one. That's not to say PC gamers won't benefit from Nvidia's technological advancements in AI, of course, as the likes of RTX and DLSS have arguably been a big step forward in the world of rendering.

And I certainly wouldn't expect the CEO of the world's most successful AI company to not push it at every possible business opportunity but I think we could all do with a bit of a breather from the relentless push for artificial intelligence festooning every aspect of our computing lives—it does wear a little thin after a while.

Best gaming PCBest gaming laptop


Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.

TOPICS
Nick Evanson
Hardware Writer

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in 1981, with the love affair starting on a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and a book on ZX Basic. He ended up becoming a physics and IT teacher, but by the late 1990s decided it was time to cut his teeth writing for a long defunct UK tech site. He went on to do the same at Madonion, helping to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its gaming and hardware section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com and over 100 long articles on anything and everything. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days? 

Read more
Meta Orion glasses on show at Meta Connect with Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.
Will there ever become a point with AI where there are no traditionally rendered frames in games? Perhaps surprisingly, Jen-Hsun says 'no'
Nvidia GR00T N1 robotics
Nvidia's GTC keynote inevitably went all in on AI but I'm definitely here for the Isaac GR00T robots
SUQIAN, CHINA - JANUARY 27, 2025 - An illustration photo shows the logo of DeepSeek and ChatGPT in Suqian, Jiangsu province, China, January 27, 2025. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
China's DeepSeek chatbot reportedly gets much more done with fewer GPUs but Nvidia still thinks it's 'excellent' news
Intel's Lunar Lake Lion Cove cores without Hyper-Threading
The future of the PC according to Intel is a CPU-GPU-NPU trifecta and that definitely includes gaming
Images of Nvidia's Blackwell GPU from GTC.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his company is 'out of GPUs' to which I reply 'welcome to the party, pal'
A screenshot taken from the 2025 Nvidia tech demo Zorah
Nvidia RTX 50-series and dev kit show that rasterization is old news and we're now firmly in the era of AI rendering
Latest in AI
Otter AI Meeting Agent
As if your work meetings weren't already fun enough, now Otter has a new all-hearing AI agent that remembers everything anyone has said and can join in the discussion
Image for
'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a defensive weapon'
CHINA - 2025/02/11: In this photo illustration, a Roblox logo is seen displayed on the screen of a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
'Humans still surpass machines': Roblox has been using a machine learning voice chat moderation system for a year, but in some cases you just can't beat real people
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
ChatGPT faces legal complaint after a user inputted their own name and found it accused them of made-up crimes
Public Eye trailer still - dead-eyed police officer sitting for an interview
I'm creeped out by this trailer for a generative AI game about people using an AI-powered app to solve violent crimes in the year 2028 that somehow isn't a cautionary tale
Closeup of the new Copilot key coming to Windows 11 PC keyboards
Microsoft co-authored paper suggests the regular use of gen-AI can leave users with a 'diminished skill for independent problem-solving' and at least one AI model seems to agree
Latest in News
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event
A Viera looking confused in Final Fantasy 14.
Old armor continues to fall victim to Final Fantasy 14's bizarre two-channel dye system, unless you're super into changing the colour of teeny-tiny eyelets: 'Why even bother at this point?'
Starfield: Shattered Space
By the time Bethesda was on Starfield, you'd 'basically get in trouble' for breaking schedule, says former dev: 'A lot of the great stuff within Skyrim came from having the freedom to do what you want'