Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hails Indian IT industry, shares success mantra for AI era

On the sidelines of the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said a few things about India. According to him, the country needs to move faster to actually seize the opportunity in front of it. When asked what message he'd give Prime Minister Narendra Modi on AI, Huang's response was blunt: "AI is moving fast, so every country has to move faster."

India’s IT industry gives it a head start

Huang pointed out that India isn't starting from scratch here. Its established IT industry, he said, gives the country a genuine advantage as AI becomes the next major technology platform. "India is one of the world's leading IT industries, and this is the beginning of a new IT platform," he said.

He also reflected on watching Modi talk about AI nearly a decade ago, long before it became the buzzword it is today, and said he's now excited to see Indian companies and startups actually building on the technology and contributing to a homegrown AI economy. Huang framed AI as something closer to core economic infrastructure at this point, adding that while the US wants to lead across the entire AI stack, other countries should have the freedom to pick and choose which parts of the AI ecosystem they want to build themselves.

Regulate real problems, not imagined ones

Huang also shared his views on AI regulation, and his advice was fairly straightforward: focus on actual harm, not hypothetical fears. "The advice that I would have is to regulate practical and actual harm and not regulate theoretical and hypothetical harm," he said.

He compared AI's current stage to the early days of cars, arguing that just as automobiles became dramatically safer as the underlying technology matured, AI should be allowed to keep improving rather than being boxed in by rules built around problems that haven't actually happened yet. He also noted that AI models have gotten noticeably better over the past two years, hallucinating less, staying more grounded in facts, and getting better at solving real, practical problems.

Nvidia is already deep into India’s AI push

This isn't just talk from Huang either. Nvidia has been actively involved in India's AI ambitions for a while now. Back in February, the company in a blog post highlighted its support for the government's IndiaAI Mission, which is backed by more than $1 billion to boost compute capacity and support sovereign datasets, frontier models, AI applications, education, and startups.

Nvidia said it's been working with cloud and infrastructure players like Yotta, L&T, and E2E Networks to expand AI computing capacity across India, alongside partnerships with Indian AI companies working on multilingual models, speech AI, and enterprise tools. The company also said more than 4,000 Indian AI startups are already part of its Nvidia Inception programme, on top of ongoing collaborations with government bodies and academic institutions.