In Monday’s keynote at Nvidia’s GTC 2024 event, CEO Jenson Huang kept repeating the phrase “AI factory.”
“Within the last Industrial Revolution, the raw material that went into the factory was water,” Huang told TechCrunch in an interview after the keynote. “And the product was electricity.”
He was comparing this — turning raw material into something else which have value — to the notion of information centers, that are purely money pits. “There’s a recent Industrial Revolution happening in these [server] rooms: I call them AI factories,” Huang said. “The raw material that goes in is data and electricity. What comes out of it’s data tokens. The token is invisible and might be distributed everywhere in the world. It’s very useful.”
The excellence makes plenty of sense in a world where Nvidia advantages tremendously if it could actually persuade firms to consider data centers and AI tools another way. “The last time, data centers went into your organization’s cost centers and capital expenditure. You’re thinking that of it as cost. Nonetheless, a factory is a distinct thing. It makes money,” he said. “The brand new world of generative AI has a recent type of factory.”
Make amends for Nvidia’s GTC 2024:
