The chief executive of fast-growing graphics and artificial intelligence hardware company Nvidia, Jensen Huang, says countries need to own the production of their own intelligence.
Huang was talking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, and referred to sovereign AI in which nations own the data used to train the technology, and the output or intelligence it produces, calling it an enormous opportunity for the world's leaders.
"It [sovereign AI] codifies your culture, your society's intelligence, your common sense, your history - you own your own data," Huang said.
AI is currently dominated by Microsoft which has gone all-in on the technology, through backing startup OpenAI and commercialising its generative pre-trained transfer (GPT) model, which powers for example, the ChatGPT chatbot.
Google which was an early AI pioneer was caught napping by OpenAI releasing ChatGPT to the public in 2022, is trying to catch up with its recent Gemini offering.
Generative AI requires vast amounts of data and computing resources, sparking concerns that the field will be dominated by just a few massive technology companies.
Huang insisted at the WGS that building AI infrastructure is not only important, but also not that costly or hard.
Nvidia 'the engine of AI'
Nvidia, which made a name for itself in the late 1990s by producing powerful graphics cards, has become the favoured hardware supplier for AI companies and very much has a vested interest in that particular technology game.
Huang was one of three engineers who founded Nvidia.
What has driven Nvidia's current success is that graphics processing units, or GPUs, are designed with lots of computing cores that work in parallel. For example, the Nvidia RTX 4090 processor has a whopping 16,384 cores, which in parallel make short work of complex mathematics.
Parallel processing turned out to offer a massive speed boost for large language models (LLMs) which are trained on vast amounts of data, particularly compared to traditional central processing units (CPUs).
Nvidia is now riding high on the AI boom, making cards designed to be used to train LLMs. The Californian company this week overtook Amazon as the fourth most valuable company in the world, behind Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet.
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