SILICON VALLEY — Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the company's investment in U.S. infrastructure will reach $1 trillion (about 1,359.3 trillion won) this year. He classified artificial intelligence as social infrastructure on par with roads and electricity, and stressed that countries need to build more data centers. The remarks are seen as defending the Donald Trump administration, which has run into opposition to data center construction, while shoring up Nvidia's own business foundation.
Speaking at the Group of 20 innovation ministers' meeting in North Carolina on the 2nd, Huang said: "The fact that every country has to recognize is that AI is important infrastructure, just like water, roads, electricity and the internet. Every country should build AI infrastructure so that it can support its own local economy."
Huang credited the U.S. regulatory environment and its pro-energy policies, saying the company "will invest nearly $1 trillion in U.S. infrastructure this year." Nvidia is working with financial firms to arrange about $500 billion (about 685.3 trillion won) in funding to support the construction of AI data centers, meaning the latest comments signal an even larger commitment. The $1 trillion figure exceeds Nvidia's cumulative free cash flow for 2026 through 2028, estimated at about $960 billion.
The link between Nvidia's revenue and data centers is growing tighter. According to the company, revenue from Nvidia servers in a 1-gigawatt data center is rising from $18 billion for Hopper to $25 billion for Grace Blackwell and $40 billion for Vera Rubin.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed Huang's remarks. At a press conference, he said data centers "will bring prosperity to local communities," attributing hostility toward the facilities to adversarial forces he did not identify.
Lutnick rebutted the main arguments made by data center opponents, namely excessive water use and concerns about higher electricity bills. Noting that almond farming and livestock raising are among the industries that consume the most water, he argued that "Big Tech will not raise electricity rates in the areas where data centers are built but will instead lower them, and will generate enormous tax revenue that brings prosperity." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said technology companies need to do a better job explaining to the public why data centers are needed.
At a separate press conference, Huang addressed the recent spread of AI regulation, saying that regulators "should regulate actual and real harm, not theoretical and hypothetical harm," and that rules should be kept to a minimum while guiding technology to develop in a safe manner.
Huang also appeared by video at Equinix Horizon, a customer conference held by Equinix in San Francisco the same day. Asked about the growing contest between closed and open-source AI models, he said both are "absolutely necessary."
Huang said future AI will not remain in a single location but will shift to a highly distributed architecture spread across multiple data centers and clouds, stressing that security controls are essential to prevent unauthorized leaks of information from AI in such a fragmented network environment. On that front, Nvidia and Equinix teamed up with open-source AI platform startup Together AI the same day to unveil Equinix Inference Exchange, a distributed inference platform for enterprises.
