Nvidia’s Huang Says Nuclear Power an Option to Feed Data Centers

(Bloomberg) -- Nvidia Corporation Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who helped create the technology at the heart of the explosion in artificial intelligence computing, said nuclear power is a good option for the renewable energy needed for the growing number of data centers. 

“Nuclear is wonderful as one of the sources of energy, one of the sources of sustainable energy,” Huang said Friday (September 27) in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “It won’t be the only one. We’re going to need energy from all sources and balance the availability and the cost of energy as well as the sustainability over time.”

In some parts of the world, electricity generation is already insufficient to support the building of new data centers. That’s an increasing problem as the world’s largest companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into new infrastructure that they believe is the future of computing.

It’s a squeeze that’s leading to trade-offs being made on the location of the new “AI factories,” as Huang refers to them. Some data centers can’t be filled to full capacity, and others are being built well away from population centers. 

Nvidia’s leader has argued that his company’s products, while more power-hungry than their predecessors – the latest generation chip requires over a kilowatt – are more efficient because they can do the work of training and running AI software more quickly and replace multiple older components. 

Related:How LLMs on the Edge Could Help Solve the AI Data Center Problem

Separately, Huang said he’s doing his best to serve customers in China and stay within the requirements of US government restrictions on Nvidia’s exports to that country. 

“The first thing we have to do is comply with whatever policies and regulations that are being imposed,” he said. “And, meanwhile, do the best we can to compete in the markets that we serve. We have a lot of customers there that depend on us and we’ll do our best to support them.”