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Jensen Huang

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2026-03-23
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2026-03-23
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  1. “Conscious about the fact that NVIDIA's success is very important to the United States. We generate enormous amounts of tax revenues. We establish technology leadership for our nation, technology leadership is important for national security. National security not just in one aspect of national security, all aspects of national security. When our country is more prosperous and Could do a better job with domestic policies and helping social benefits because we're generating so much reindustrialization in the United States. We're creating mountains of jobs. We're helping shift the”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And it's more likely that your AI is bothering you all the time. And the reason for that is because it's getting stuff done so fast. Is reporting back to you. I got that done. You know, what do you want me to do next? That's the part that I think most people don't realize is the person who's going to be chatting with them. Texting them most is their claws or lobster.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Agents in general The iPhone of tokens arrived. It is the fastest growing application in history. It went straight up. Went straight”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “If NVIDIA was a $10 billion company trying to take NVIDIA's share, then it's easy to see for shareholders that, oh yeah, if they could just take 10% share, they could be this much larger. But it's hard for people to imagine how large we could be because there's nobody I could take share from. And so I think that that's one of the challenges for the world is the imagination of the future. But I got plenty of time and I'll keep reasoning about it and I'll keep talking about it and every single GTC will become more and more real and then more and more people talk about it in one of these days, we'll get there. But 100% we'll get there.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I was reminded of a CEO who told me, you know, Jensen, it's theoretically impossible for a fabulous semiconductor company to exceed a billion dollars. And I won't bore you with why, but of course it's illogical and there's a lot of evidence we're not. And then somebody told me, you know, Jensen, you'll never be more than $25 billion because of some other company. Somebody told me that you'll never because, and then so that'sn't principal first principle reason thinking. And the simple way to think about that is, what is it that we make and how large is the opportunity that we can create? Now, NVIDIA is not in the market share business. Almost everything that I just talked about don't exist. That's the part that's hard.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And then the rest of it to me is it possible for NVIDIA to be a, you know, three trillion dollar revenues company in the near future? The answer is of course yes, and the reason for that Because it's not limited by any physical limits. There's nothing that I see that says, you know, gosh, three trillion dollars is not possible. And It turns out NVIDIA supply chain is the burden is shared by two hundred companies. And the fact that we scale out on the backs of with the partnership of this ecosystem. Question is do we have the energy to do so? And surely we will have the energy to do so. And so all of these things combined. That number is just a number, you know, and I still remember Nvidia was the first time we crossed a billion dollars.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “What would happen to the world's economy if the productivity were to improve so substantially, what would happen are we going to discover new drugs, new products, new services? And so when you take these things in combination, I am absolutely certain that That the world's GDP is going to accelerate in growth. I'm absolutely certain the percentage of that GDP that will be used for computation will be a hundred times more than the past because it's no longer a storage unit, it's a product generation unit. And so when you look at it in that context and then you back into what is NVIDIA's do and how much of that New economics, new industry would we have to benefit to address, I think we're going to be a lot, lot bigger.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You have free tokens, you have premium tokens, and you have several tokens in the middle. And so intelligence, as it turns out, is a scalable product. There's extremely high intelligence products, tokens that you could that are used for specialized things, people be willing to pay the idea that somebody's willing to pay $1,000 per million tokens is just around the corner. It's not if, it's only when. And so now we're seeing that the commodity that this factory makes is actually valuable and is revenue generating and profit generating. Now, the question is how many of these factories does the world need? How many tokens does the world need? Much is society willing to pay for these tokens?”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Computers, because it was a storage system, it was largely a warehouse. Now building factories. Warehouses don't make much money. Factories directly correlate with a company's revenues. And so The computer did two things. Not only did it change the way it did it, its purpose in the world changed. It's no longer computer, it's a factory. A factory is used for generation of revenues. We now seen not only is this factory generating products, commodities that people want to consume, Seeing that the commodities are so interesting, so valuable, so to so many different audiences, that the tokens are starting to segment like iPhones.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The only thing that would cause it to go back is if this way of computation, this way of computing, generating information that's contextually relevant, situationally aware, that is grounded on new insight before it generates information, this computation intensive way of doing computing would only go back if it's not effective. So if for the last ten, fifteen years while working on deep learning, if at any single moment I would have come to the conclusion that, you know what, this is not going to work out. I think this is a dead end, or it's not going to scale. It's not going to solve this modality. It's not going to be used in this application. Then, of course, I would feel very differently about it. But I think the last five years has given me more confidence than the last 10 years, the previous 10 years. The second idea”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “To now, AI computers are contextually aware, which means that it has to process and generate tokens in real time. So we went from a retrieval-based computing system to a generative-based computing system. Going to need a lot more processing in this new world than in the old world. We need a lot of storage in the old world. We need a lot of computation in this new world. And so So that's the first part of it. We fundamentally changed computing in the way how computing is done.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Do you think NVIDIA may be worth 10 trillion at some point. Let's ask it this way what is the future of the world look like where that's true? I think that NVIDIA's growth is a Extremely likely and in my mind inevitable. And let me explain why. The largest computer company in history That alone should beg the question why. And the reason for course two reasons first, two foundational technical reasons. The first reason is that computing went from being a retrieval based file retrieval system. Everything is afar. We pre-write something, we pre-record something, you know, we draw something, we put it on the web, we put it in a file. And we use a recommendender system, some smart filter, to figure out what to retrieve for you. And so we were a pre-recording human pre-recording and file retrieving system. That's what a computer is, largely.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I'm just so much more practical. I look for where my next bucket of opportunities are first. Meanwhile, I'm cultivating space. And so I send engineers to go work on the problem. We're learning a lot about it. How do we do radiation? How do we do degrading performance? How do we deal with a continuous testing and attestation of defects? And how do we deal with redundancy and how do we degrade gracefully and things like that? And so we could do what about software? How do you think about software and redundancy and performance out in space? Make it so that the computer never breaks. It just gets slower. And so we could start doing a lot of engineer exploration up front. In the meantime, my favorite answer is eliminate waste. We've got all that idle power. I want to evacuate it as fast as possible.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Know, because those satellites have really high resolution imaging systems and they're sweeping the earth continuously now. And you want centimeter scale imaging that is done continuously for the world so that you'll basically have real-time telemetry of everything. You don't want to beam that back down to Earth. It's just petabytes and petabytes of data. You got to just do AI right there at the edge. throw away everything you don't need you've seen before didn't change and then just keep the stuff that that you need and so ai ought to be done at the edge obviously we have we have 24-7 solar if we put it at the polars and um But there's no conduction, no convection. And so, you know, you're pretty much just radiation. But, you know, space is big, I guess. We're just going to put big giant radiators out there.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “We're already there. NVIDIA GPUs are the first GPUs in space. And I didn't realize it was so interesting to it. I would have declared it maybe we're in space. Little astronaut suit on one of our GPUs. But we've been in space. It's the right place to do a lot of imaging.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Entire infrastructure. And I'm hoping my next click is when I'm thinking about building computers that's planetary scale. That'll be the next click.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Was my mental model what I was building Today. Picking up the chip is kind of still adorable. But it's adorable. It's not my mental model of what I'm doing. My mental model is this giant gigawatt thing that has power generations connected to the grid, it's got cooling systems and networking of incredible monstrosity. You know, ten thousand people are in there trying to install it. Hundreds of networking engineers in there. Thousands of engineers behind it trying to power it up. Powering up one of those factories, as you know, is not somebody going, it's on now. It takes thousands of people to bring it up.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “The unit of computing used to be GPU to us. Then it became a computer. Then it became a cluster. Now it's an entire AI factory. When I see a computer, when I see what NVIDIA builds in the old days, I visualize the chip. And then when I announced a new product, new generation, like ladies and gentlemen, we're announcing Ampere today. I pick up the chip.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “We're ramping up AWS like crazy right now. We're in new companies like Coreweave and NSCAL. We're in supercomputers at Lily. We're in enterprise computers. We're at the edge in radio base stations. You know, it's just crazy. One architecture is in all these different systems. We're in cars, wearing robots, we're in satellites. We're out in space. And so the fact that you have this one architecture and the ecosystem is so broad, it basically covers every single industry in the world.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “You put all that stuff together. If I were a developer today, I would target CUDA first. I would target CUDA most. And that's the reason that I think in the final analysis is our first that's even our first. Advantage. Our second one is our ecosystem. The fact that we vertically integrated this incredibly complex system, but we integrated horizontally into every single company's computers. We're into Google Cloud, we're in Amazon, we're in Azure.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That velocity combined with the installed base in the developer's mind is just going to now take the developer's mind from the developer's perspective. If I support CUDA, Tomorrow it will be 10 times better. I just have to wait six months on average. Not only that, if I develop it on CUDA, I reach a few hundred million people, computers. I'm in every cloud, I'm in every computer company, I'm in every single industry, I'm in every single country. So, if I had to create an open source package and I put it on CUDA first I get these built attributes simultaneously. And not only that I trust 100% that NVIDIA is going to keep Kuda around and maintain it and improve it and keep optimizing the libraries for as long as they shall live. You could take that to the bank, and that last part, trust.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And the reason for that is because it's never been just about the technology, the technology, of course, was incredible visionary. But it's the fact that the company was dedicated to it, stuck with it, expanded its reach. It wasn't three people that made coup successful. It was $43,000 that made CUDA successful. And the several million developers that believed in us that trusted that we were going to continue to make CUDA 1, 2, 3, 13, that they decided to port and dedicate their software on top of it, their mountain of software on top of it. And so the install base is the number one most important advantage. That install base, when you amplified with the velocity of our execution at the scale that we're talking about, no company in history had ever built systems of this complexity. Period, and then to build it once a year is impossible.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Single Most important property as a company is the installed base of our computing platform. Single most important thing is today is the installed base of CUDA. Now, the reason why 20 years ago, of course, there was no install base. What makes, and if somebody came up with a Gouda or Tuda, it wouldn't make any difference at all.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Story is true. I didn't dismiss it. But I was deeply honored. And of course I knew then, as I know now, TSMC is one of the most consequential companies in history. And Morris is one of the highest regarded executives and business and personal friend that I've had in my life. For him to ask is I was humbled and really honored. But the work that I'm doing here is really important. And I've seen, you know, in my mind anyways, in my mind's eye, what NVIDIA was going to be and what the impact that we could have. And it was really important work. And it's my responsibility. You know, my sole responsibility to make this happen. And so I declined it, not because it wasn't an incredible offer. It's an unbelievable offer. But I simply couldn't take it.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Three decades. I don't know how many tens, hundreds of billions of dollars of business we've done through them. And we don't have a contract. Pretty great”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Simultaneously customer service oriented, on the other hand. A lot of companies are very customer service oriented, but they're not very technology excellent. They're not at the bleeding edge of technology. A lot of companies who are at the bleeding edge of technology, but they're not the best customer service-oriented company. And so it just depends on somehow they've balanced these two and their world class of both. And then probably the third thing is the technology that I most value in them that they created this intangible called trust. I trust them to put my company on top of them. That's a very big deal.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Way for starting, wafer stopping, emergency, wafer starts, you know, all of this dynamics of the world's complexity as the world is shape shifting all the time. And somehow they're running a factory with high throughput, high yields, really great costs, excellent customer service. They take their work seriously. When your wafer, because they know that your helping you run your company, when the wafers were promised to show up, the wafers show up so that you could run your company appropriately. And so their system, their manufacturing system is completely miraculous. I would say then the second thing is their culture. This culture is simultaneously technology focused on one hand, advancing technology.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “First of all, the deepest misunderstanding about TSMC is that Their technology is all they have, that somehow they have a really great transistor. And if somebody shows up another transistor, game over. The technology, and of course, you know, I don't mean just the transistor and metalization systems, the packaging, the 3D packaging, the silicon photonics, all of the technology that they have, that technology is really what makes the company special. Their technology makes the company special. But their ability to orchestrate the demands, the dynamic demands of hundreds of companies in the world as they're moving up, shifting out, increasing, decreasing, pushing out, pulling in, changing from customer to customer,”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I appreciate you for saying that. We open source the models, we open source the weights, we open source the data, we open source how we created it. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Biology, AI, AI for biology, physical AI, all of that stuff can be pushed to the limits and pushed to the frontier. We don't build cars, but we want to make sure every car company has access to great models. We don't discover drugs, but I want to make sure that Lily has the world's best biology, AI systems, so that they can go use it for discovering drugs. So these three fundamental reasons, both in recognizing that AI is not just language, that AI is really broad, that we want to engage everybody into the world of AI, and then also co-design of AI.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “The third reason, which is that to recognizing that AI is not just language, these AIs will likely use tools and models and sub agents that were trained on other modalities of information, maybe it's biology or chemistry or laws of physics or fluids and thermal dynamics. And not all of it is in language structure. And so somebody has to go make sure that whether prediction”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “If everything's proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of, around with. And so Open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution. NVIDIA has the scale, and we have the motives. To not only skills, scale, and motivation, to build and continue to build these AI models for as long as we shall live. And so therefore we ought to do that. We can open up, we can activate every industry, every researcher, every country to be able to join the AI revolution.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “If we're going to be a great AI computing company, we have to understand how AI models are evolving. One of the things that I love about Nemotron 3 is not just a pure transformer model, it's transformer and SSMs. And we were early in developing the conditional GANS, which that progressive GANS, which led step by step to diffusion. And so the fact that we're doing basic research in model architecture and in different domains gives us visibility into what kind of computing systems would do a good job for future models. And so it is part of our extreme co-design strategy. Second, I think we rightfully recognize that on the one hand, we want world-class models as products, and they should be proprietary. On the other hand, we also want AI to diffuse into every industry and every country. Every researcher, every student?”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “To build our nation, our country's leaders are incredible, but they're mostly lawyers. Their country's leaders, because they're trying to keep us safe, rule of law, governing, their country was built out of poverty. And so most of their leaders are incredible engineers. Some of the brightest minds.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Country in the world today, and this is something that has everything that I've just said is fundamental to just how the kids were grown, the fact that they have excellent education, the fact that they parents want them to do well in school, the fact that their culture is that way, these are, you know, these are just the thing about their country. And they showed up precisely the time when technology is going through that exponential.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So, the fact that they contribute more to open source is so sensible because they're probably what are we protecting, you know, mineers, the brothers are in that company, their friends are in that company, and they're all schoolmates, you know, the schoolmate concept. Once schoolmate, your brother for life. And so they... They share knowledge very, very quickly. And so there's no sense keeping technology hidden. You might as well put it on open source. And so the open source community then amplifies, accelerates the innovation process. So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just the nature of friends. And insane competition among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so Is the fastest innovating?”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Giant economic country has got many provinces and cities with mayors all competing with each other. That's the reason why there's so many EV companies. That's the reason why there's so many AI companies. That's the reason why there's so many every company you can imagine. They all create some of them. And as a result, they have insane competition internally. What remains is an incredible company. They also have a social culture where it's family first, friend second, and company third Amount of conversation that goes back and forth between their essentially open source all the time”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Whole bunch of reasons for, well, first of all, let's start with some facts 50% of the world's AI researchers are Chinese. Plus or minus Mostly in China. Still, we have many of them here, but there's amazing researchers still in China. Their tech industry showed up at precisely the right tim The time of the mobile cloud era, their way of contributing with software. And so this is a country's incredible science Really well educated kids. Their tech industry was created during the era of software. Very comfortable with modern software. China is not”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “The phrase that I use most often is we need things to be as complex as necessary but as simple as possible. And so the question is, is all that complexity there necessary? And we ought to test for that. And we challenge that. And then after that, everything else above it is gratuitous”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “But I don't like going into a problem, and somebody says, Hey, it takes 74 days to do this today right now, and we can do it for you in 72 days. You know, I rather strip it all back to zero. And so, first of all, explain to me why it's 74 days in the first place. And let's think about what's possible today. And if I were to build it completely from scratch, how long would it take? Oftentimes you'd be surprised and might come to six days. Now the rest of the six days to seventy-four could be very well reasoned and compromises and, you know, cost reductions and all kinds of different things. But at least you know what they are. And now that you know that six days is possible. Then the conversation from 74 to 6. Surprisingly much more effective.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “First of all, you should engineer something from first principles at the speed with speed of light thinking, limited only by physical limits and physics limits. And after that, of course, you would improve it over time.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And then when you consider it together, you know, you have to make compromises because a system that achieves extremely low latency versus a system that achieves very high throughput are architective fundamentally differently, but you want to know what's the speed of light of a system that achieves high throughput, what's the speed of light of a system that achieves low latency. And then when you think about the total system, you could make trade-offs. And so I force everybody to think about what the first principles, the limits, the physical limits. For everything before we do anything and we test everything against that. And so that's a good frame of mind. I don't love the other methods, which is continuous improvement. The problem with continuous improvement, it”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Well, first of all, co-design is an ultimate systems engineering problem. And so we approach the work that we do from that principle. The other thing that we do, and this is a philosophy that a thought, a state of mind, I guess, a method that I started thirty years ago and it's called the speed of light. A speed of light is not just about the speed. A speed of light might shorthand for what's the limit of what physics can do. And so everything that we do is compared it against the speed of light. Memory speed, math speed, power, cost, time, effort, number of people, manufacturing cycle time. And when you think about latency versus throughput, when you think about cost versus throughput, cost versus Capacity, all of these things, you test against the speed of light to achieve all of these different constraints separately.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “He'll just go there. There's a problem. He'll just go there and show me the problem. You know, when you do all of this in combination, you overcome a lot of previous, this is just the way we do it. I'm waiting for them. I mean, everybody has a lot of excuses. And so then the last thing is when you act personally with so much urgency, it causes everybody else to act with urgency. And every supplier has a lot of customers going on. Every supplier has a lot of projects going on. And he makes it his business that he's the top priority of everybody else's projects. And so he does that by demonstrating it.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “First of all, Elon is deep in so many different topics, yet he's also a really good systems thinker. And so he's able to think through multiple disciplines. And he obviously pushes things, questions everything, where they're number one. Is it necessary? Number two, does it have to be done this way? And does it have to take this long? And so he has the ability to question everything to the point where everything is down to its minimal amount that is necessary. You can't take anything else out. And yet the necessary capabilities of the product retains. And so he is as minimalist as you could possibly imagine. And he does it at a system scale. I also love the fact that he is represented. He is present at the point of action.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So, the second thing is The data centers. And a third thing is we need utilities to also recognize that this is an opportunity. And instead of saying, look, it's going to take me five years to increase my grid capability. If you're willing to take power of this level of guarantee, Can make them available for you next month and at this price. And so if utilities also offered more segments of power delivery promises than I think everybody will figure out what to do with it. But there's just way too much waste in the grid right now. We should go after it.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “As soon as you could specify, you could engineer it. Beautifully put. So long as it obeys the laws of physics on first principles, I think we're good.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “CSPs then have to go down to the utilities and they expect a six nines. And so I think the first thing is just make sure that all of the customers, the CEOs of the customers realize what they're asking for. Now the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade. And so if the power, if the utility, if the grid tells us, listen, we're going to have to back you down to about 80%. We're going to say that's no problem at all. We're just going to move our workload around. We're going to make sure that data is never lost, but we can reduce the computing rate and use less energy, the quality of service degrades a little bit. For the critical workloads, I shift that somewhere else right away. So, I don't have that problem. And so, you know, whichever data center still has 100% uptime.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I think, first of all, right now we ought to have everybody understand that when the customer asks for these things, you got somebody in your data center operations team disconnected from the CEO. I bet the CEO doesn't know this. I'm going to talk to all the CEOs. The CEOs are probably not paying any attention to the contracts that are being signed. And so everybody wants to sign the best contract, of course. And they go down to cloud service providers and the contract the two contract negotiators that are you I could just see them now, you know, negotiating these multi-year contracts both sides want the best contract as a result.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I think it's a throughway problem. It starts with the end customer. The end customer puts requirements on the data centers that they can never Not be available. Okay, so that the end customer expects perfection. Now, in order to deliver that perfection, you need a combination of backup generators and your grid power supplier to deliver on perfection. And so everybody's got to have six nines.”

    2026-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source