NVIDIA CEO Says He Can Run Company As a Robot for Another 30 Years

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang joked (we think?) about becoming a robot and running NVIDIA for another 30 years in a recent interview with CNBC. When asked how long he planned to continue being NVIDIA’s CEO, he said he thinks he can keep doing a good job for another 30 years in his human form, and then, “In another four decades I’ll be robotic and maybe another three or four decades after that. So hopefully I’ll get to enjoy this for a very long time.”.

Huang is the longest running tech CEO in the world. He founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has been its CEO for 30 years. CNBC interviewed Huang about a range of topics, from AI and virtual reality to gaming and Chinese export controls, ahead of NVIDIA’s GTC conference.

The leather jacket-clad CEO is 60 years old. “Well as you can tell I’m spritely and quite enthusiastic and energetic yet,” Huang told CNBC when she asked how long he planned to remain CEO. He said he’d stay in the job as long as he felt he was making a contribution to the company. “I don’t know exactly how long that’s going to be but three or four decades I would say.

It was a flippant comment, and presumably a joke, though neither him nor the interviewer were laughing. The comment also came ahead of NVIDIA’s GTC event, which focused heavily on recent developments in AI, many of which are powered by NVIDIA’s tech.

 It’s also not the first time Huang has played with the idea of an artificial clone of himself. In 2021, NVIDIA announced its highly anticipated 3000 series of GPUs and Huang gave the presentation in his kitchen. Later, the company revealed it had deepfaked the entire presentation. "To create a virtual Jensen, teams did a full face and body scan to create a 3D model, then trained an AI to mimic his gestures and expressions and applied some AI magic to make his clone realistic," Nvidia wrote in a blog post about the presentation. "Digital Jensen was then brought into a replica of his kitchen that was deconstructed to reveal the holodeck within Omniverse, surprising the audience and making them question how much of the keynote was real, or rendered."