The infrastructure to develop and power artificial intelligence models will require “trillions” more in investment, the head of top AI chipmaker Nvidia said on Wednesday.

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where AI boosterism is overshadowed by a transatlantic showdown over US President Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland.

But today’s AI boom has “triggered the biggest infrastructure buildout in human history,” Huang said.

“We are now several hundred billion dollars into it… trillions of dollars of infrastructure needs to be built in sectors including energy, cloud computing and electronics”, he added.

Nvidia has dominated spending on the processors needed to train and operate the large language models (LLMs) behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Gemini.

Sales of its graphics processing units (GPUs) — originally developed for 3D gaming — pushed the company’s market cap to more than $5 trillion in October, though that figure has since fallen to more than $600 billion.

LLM developers like OpenAI are directing much of the investment in Nvidia’s products, rushing to build GPU-stuffed data centers to meet the expected demand for AI services.

Huang on Wednesday dismissed warnings from some observers that the spending spree looks increasingly like a bubble that could soon burst.

“The AI ​​bubble comes because the investments are big. And the investments are big because we have to build the infrastructure necessary for all the layers of AI on top of that,” he said.

“I think the opportunity is really quite extraordinary.”

Huang also tried to allay fears of AI destroying large numbers of jobs as its use filters into workplaces, saying instead that it will create new forms of work.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella struck a more cautious note on Tuesday, saying widespread AI adoption is needed to avoid an industry crash.

“In order not to become a bubble by this definition, its benefits need to be spread more evenly,” he said.

Yet Nadella “believed that this was a technology that would really build on the rails of cloud and mobile, spread rapidly,” which would drive “economic growth around the world.”