Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang pointed to cybersecurity as the next major market for artificial intelligence. The outlook is that demand for related AI will grow as AI accelerates both the speed of software development and the advancement of techniques for exploiting and defending against security vulnerabilities.
According to Bloomberg on the 10th (local time), Huang said at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco that "cybersecurity is likely to be the next major application area for AI."
Huang explained that as the automation of computer programming using AI rapidly advances, both the speed of finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities and the speed of developing patches to defend against them are increasing together. He said, "What better way is there to create demand than by creating problems," noting that AI is creating new security threats while also boosting demand for AI to block them.
However, he cautioned against using the cybersecurity crisis as a means to expand AI demand. Huang said, "There are responsible ways to execute this, and there are undesirable ways."
The remarks are seen as an extension of the existing outlook that AI infrastructure investment will continue for a long period. Nvidia has emphasized that demand for data center AI accelerators will keep expanding amid talk of overheated AI investment and a bubble.
Huang also pushed back against criticism that Nvidia's large-scale AI investments by corporations amount to so-called "circular transactions" that come back as purchases of its own semiconductors. Regarding Nvidia's recent decision to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $13 billion (about 17.5 trillion won), he said, "We invest a little money and recoup more money, so it is not a circular transaction."
He added, "People are beginning to realize that the places I invest, with a lot of information, are not bad investments," explaining that before investing, he checks whether there are enough customers who want the corporations' products. He described this as a "sure thing."