Image courtesy of World Economic Forum/Thibaut Bouvier

Not all the talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week was about geopolitics or an 800,000-square-mile block of ice. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made his first appearance at Davos, and, unsurprisingly, he chose AI as his topic.

In an interview with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Huang described AI as “a five-layer cake,” spanning energy, chips and computing infrastructure, cloud data centers, AI models, and, finally, applications. Although Nvidia is an infrastructure company that produces chips and AI models have progressed tremendously over the past year, Huang emphasized that the application layer is truly the icing on the cake.

“This layer on top, ultimately, is where economic benefit will happen,” Huang said.

However, that economic benefit requires unprecedented investment.

“Because this computing platform requires all of the layers underneath it, it has started the largest infrastructure buildout in human history,” Huang said. “We’re now a few hundred billion dollars into it. There are trillions of dollars of infrastructure that need to be built out.”

He pointed out that all of this has resulted in software that almost anyone can use, regardless of their technical skills.

“AI is super easy to use — it’s the easiest software to use in history,” Huang said, claiming that AI tools have reached nearly a billion people in just a few years. “It is very clear that it is essential to learn how to use AI — how to direct it, manage it, guardrail it, and evaluate it.”

Despite widespread fears that AI will take people’s jobs, Huang argued that AI is creating jobs and making others easier in industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services. The infrastructure buildout is also creating jobs for plumbers, electricians, construction workers, steelworkers, and network technicians.

He called AI essential national infrastructure. “AI is infrastructure,” he said, arguing that nations should treat AI like electricity or roads. “You should have AI as part of your infrastructure.”

Financial services executive Fink pointed out another potential AI benefit.

“I actually believe it’s going to be a great investment for pension funds around the world to be a part of that, to grow with this AI world,” Fink said. “We need to make sure that the average pensioner and the average saver is part of that growth. If they’re just watching it from the sidelines, they’re going to feel left out.”