In Monday’s keynote at Nvidia’s GTC 2024 event, CEO Jenson Huang kept repeating the phrase “AI factory.”
“In 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 that have value — to the notion of data centers, which are purely money pits. “There’s a new 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 is data tokens. The token is invisible and will be distributed all over the world. It’s very valuable.”
The distinction makes a lot of sense in a world where Nvidia benefits tremendously if it can persuade companies to think of data centers and AI tools in a different way. “The last time, data centers went into your company’s cost centers and capital expenditure. You think of it as cost. However, a factory is a different thing. It makes money,” he said. “The new world of generative AI has a new form of factory.”