Jensen Nvidia thinks he can boost world GDP to unprecedented $500 trillion

Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, is telling the world he thinks AI can push global output from $100 trillion to $500 trillion, something economists just don’t believe is possible.

In a mind-bending TIME Magazine feature that named ‘The Architects of AI’ as its ‘Person of the Year,’ Jensen was listed alongside these guys:

• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
• Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind
• Fei-Fei Li, Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and CEO of World Labs
• Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, SpaceX, and Tesla
• Lisa Su, CEO of AMD
• Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta

But this story is about Jensen Nvidia. “There’s a belief that the world’s GDP is somehow limited at $100 trillion,” he apparently said. “AI is going to cause that $100 trillion to become $500 trillion.”

“Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” he said, calling it “the single most impactful technology of our time.”

Jensen is of course is making that pitch as the whole world watches AI inching closer and closer to fulfilling a prediction Sam Altman made earlier this year, which is that AI will replace God.

Over the past year and a half, Sam claims that his ChatGPT has acquired more than 800 million weekly users.

Trump-Jensen bromance steers Nvidia into geopolitics

As for Jensen, Donald Trump has hung out with him many times since he took back the Oval in January and has since then been treating the most valuable company on the planet like leverage in diplomacy and trade, mainly with China, but also Russia and UK.

During a state visit to the United Kingdom in May, Trump straight up told Jensen, “You’re taking over the world.” Then Jensen told us in Nvidia’s Q2 earnings call that his relationship with the leader of the free world is close enough to include late-night calls.

During Trump’s first week, Sriram Krishnan, a top AI adviser who was still waiting for his official government badge, was called to brief senior officials on a Chinese breakthrough linked to the now-infamous DeepSeek.

Sriram told Trump and Jensen that America needed to build fast and remove red tape so domestic AI companies could move without restraint.

Trump responded with a policy sprint, signing an executive order that tore up former President Joe Biden’s more cautious AI posture and announced Stargate, a multi-year $500 billion initiative to build massive data centers meant to train and house future versions of OpenAI models.

Immediately after that, Trump also approved more than $1 billion in AI funding in his signature tax-and-spending bill, including nearly $25 billion for an AI-powered Golden Dome defense system, and he directed defense contracts toward AI companies, including deals described as up to $200 million each for OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Trump kept tariffs in place while carving out major exemptions for AI-related hardware and rolled back export controls on Nvidia chip sales to China and Gulf states that had been among the hardest penalties under Biden.

The president also personally pressed Jensen to commit to buying billions of dollars of chips from a new factory in Arizona, and that factory began fabricating cutting-edge semiconductors on U.S. soil in October for the first time in decades, helped by purchase guarantees tied to the White House.

Jensen’s argument for a $500 trillion global economy ran on AI

Jensen’s $500 trillion argument rests on AI systems spreading through work at scale, and the feature traced how that spread happened through model design, new tooling, and hard physical infrastructure.

Large language models were described as neural networks trained on massive data so they could predict “tokens,” then refined with reinforcement learning so outputs matched what developers wanted.

OpenAI researchers were described as improving performance by giving models time to “reason” in natural language before responding, a method that demanded more computing power but delivered stronger results.

The TIME feature also described uneven economics inside the AI industry. OpenAI projected a $9 billion deficit in 2025, with costs expected to rise faster than profits for two more years because of data center spending.

A J.P. Morgan analyst had earlier estimated the industry needed something like every iPhone user paying $34.72 a month to AI companies. Then a debated MIT study from August found 95% of companies had seen zero return on AI integration.

Job anxiety followed the money. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, estimated AI could drive unemployment as high as 20% within one to five years. Amazon cut 14,000 corporate jobs and planned to replace half a million jobs with robots.

Jensen addressed the fear directly while rejecting catastrophe language. “Some jobs will disappear,” he said, while pointing to radiology as an example where AI increased demand because it improved detection.

“So long as the need is high for that particular industry, I’m fairly confident that AI will drive productivity, revenue growth, and therefore more hiring,” Jensen said. “If you don’t use AI, you’re gonna lose your job to somebody who does. Watch.”

That almost sounds like a threat.

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