Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: “We’re Going to Use a Lot More Fossil Fuel”
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden ● Covered by 124 sources
Jensen Huang says AI will need more gas and oil for years. He says the rush to power data centers is already forcing a fossil-fuel detour.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks the clean-energy future is going to take a while to get here, and AI is part of the reason. In a long interview with Ezra Klein for The New York Times, he said the world will use “a lot more fossil fuel” over the next four or five years because there isn’t enough sustainable power ready to carry the load.
His argument is blunt. The U.S., he said, did not plan enough energy production while getting tangled up in climate and sustainable-energy debates, so when AI demand arrived, the country had to scramble. He even compared the transition to surgery: painful now, necessary later.
The near-term evidence is already visible in gas turbines. GE Vernova’s data center business now accounts for around one fifth of its orders, its books are full through 2029, and the price of a turbine has climbed by around 300 percent in three years to roughly $250 million. Microsoft is putting in seven turbines in Texas, and xAI runs gas turbines at its Tennessee site.
Nuclear is the longer-term bet, but Huang’s interview underlined how far away that still is. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all tied to small-reactor plans or restarts, yet the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says no SMR is under construction in the U.S. and a single reactor usually produces less than 300 megawatts. That leaves a huge gap for giant AI campuses, and right now fossil fuel is filling it.
Huang also used the interview to push back on the AI-doom crowd. He called alarmism unhelpful, said safety is an engineering problem, and argued that companies should be willing to shut themselves down if they can’t control their products. He also said open models are winning more of the token traffic, which is the part that should make both the safety people and the closed-model evangelists a little uncomfortable.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the oldest trick in tech dressed up as destiny: build the infrastructure first, then call the emissions phase “temporary.” Huang is right that power is the bottleneck, but when the biggest chip seller in the room says the answer is more compute and more faith, the incentives are doing most of the talking. The sober take is simpler: AI doesn’t get a clean-energy moral exemption just because the servers are expensive.
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