Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Talks Upbeat Outlook, Blackwell Sales

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Bloomberg Talks

Episode: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Talks Upbeat Outlook, Blackwell Sales
Date: November 20, 2025
Host: Bloomberg Interviewer
Guest: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

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Episode Overview

This episode features a candid conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, focusing on Nvidia’s surging demand, product pipeline (particularly Blackwell and the forthcoming Vera Rubin), global sales complexities, supply chain management, and the future of AI compute. Huang addresses Nvidia’s handling of geopolitical obstacles, explosive market demand, and the technical/financial nuances that keep Nvidia at the forefront of AI hardware.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Blackwell GPU Overwhelming Demand and Supply Chain Mastery

• Nvidia is “sold out” of Blackwell GPUs and cloud supply.
• Jensen emphasizes robust supply chain planning and credits partners like TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Foxconn, and others for supporting this growth.

  “Sales are off the charts for Blackwell and Nvidia GPUs in the Cloud are sold out. ...Business is very, very strong. But we've planned our supply chain incredibly well.”
  — Jensen Huang [00:50]

• Despite soaring demand, Nvidia is prepared to supply more Blackwells and is already preparing for the Vera Rubin ramp.

2. Vera Rubin Roadmap and Architectural Continuity

• Vera Rubin remains on schedule for a Q3 2026 launch, with “bring up” going smoothly across engineering teams.

  “The silicon for Vera Rubin...is back in our labs and the bring up is happening...This bring up is going beautifully. We're on track to deliver Vera Rubin about Q3 timeframe of next year.”
  — Jensen Huang [02:06]

• The new rack scale architecture, featuring the fifth-gen NVLink72 scale-up switch, is described as “completely revolutionary” and provides seamless transition from preceding architectures.

  “This rack architecture...is completely revolutionary...it is transitioned to Grace Blackwell Ultra...incredibly seamless. The same rack scale architecture is going to be used for Vera Rubin.”
  — Jensen Huang [02:58]

3. China Market & Regulatory Headwinds

• Nvidia’s guidance assumes zero revenue from China due to U.S. export controls; engagement with both Chinese and U.S. governments is ongoing.

  “Our forecast for China is zero. All of our forecast guidance that we showed zero, we should start. That's the most important thing that she [CFO Colette Kress] said.”
  — Jensen Huang [04:16]

• Huang stresses the global benefits of Nvidia’s tech in China, but confirms sales are on pause until restrictions are lifted.

4. U.S. Export Permissions & Preventing Diversion

• The U.S. Commerce Department’s recent approval allows Nvidia to export up to 35,000 Blackwell chips to Saudi Arabia and UAE, with strict anti-diversion precautions (especially concerning China).

  “Over the years people have speculated about diversion...We've chased down every single concern...And so this is an area that we'll continue to be rigorous on.”
  — Jensen Huang [06:20]

• Nvidia complies through rigorous checking and technical safeguards to ensure chips reach their intended destinations.

5. The Power Constraint: Energy as a Bottleneck in AI Expansion

• Energy availability is a key constraint, even more so than hardware supply.

  “When you're growing at the rate and scale of Nvidia...everything's a challenge...not to mention all around the world, our customer base, our network of partners is so large that we will find nooks and crannies of power...in different parts of the world.”
  — Jensen Huang [07:28]

• Nvidia leverages its global partner network to access energy resources and land needed for new data infrastructure.

6. Partnering with Hyper-scalers & AI Labs (OpenAI, Anthropic)

• Huang discusses capital discipline in scaling up capacity for AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

  “The ambition is large, but the execution is disciplined. That's really, really important to recognize. We're very disciplined with our investment, we're disciplined with our build out.”
  — Jensen Huang [10:00]

• Demand is “absolutely real and incredible,” and Nvidia works to optimize capacity use amid exponential demand growth.

7. The Longevity & Depreciation of Nvidia GPUs

• Huang addresses concerns that investors may underestimate the useful lifespan of Nvidia's chips.

  “If you look at products that we shipped—Ampere A100—we shipped six years ago. ...It is still an order of a magnitude faster than any CPU...it is still the best processor for much of the workload in the cloud.”
  — Jensen Huang [12:23]

• He asserts Nvidia’s value comes from software versatility (CUDA) and compatibility with a wide spectrum of AI workloads, supporting a long useful life for each generation.

8. Cost Contribution in Data Centers

• Clarifying an earlier statement, Huang affirms that Nvidia’s typical contribution (e.g., to a 1 GW data center) is measured in billions of dollars, not as a percentage of cost.

  “Billions of dollars. Yeah. And so for our Vera Rubin system, a 1 gigawatt data center is probably something along the lines of 50 to 55. And Nvidia's contribution is probably about 35 of that.”
  — Jensen Huang [14:49]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On China Forecasts:
  “Our Nvidia's forecast for China market is zero. We're going to continue to engage the US government, continue to engage the China government to advise them and to encourage them to allow us to go back and compete in the open market. And so until then we should assume zero.”
  — Jensen Huang [04:47]
• On AI Demand Exponential Growth:
  “You're seeing an exponential growth in the amount of compute demand necessary for AI... we've got to do our best to support the scaling out of two of the most consequential companies in history and we're delighted to be partnered with them.”
  — Jensen Huang [11:36]
• On Longevity of Nvidia Chips:
  “Unlike us, most accelerators are kind of singular use because they don't have diversity, because they don't have versatility, because they're not great at every phase of AI. Once they're used for whatever they were designed to do, their value falls off a cliff. That is not true with Nvidia.”
  — Jensen Huang [13:57]
• On Data Center Costs:
  “The difference between percentages and billions. A big deal. Yeah, it's in billions.”
  — Jensen Huang [15:21]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:50] Blackwell demand & supply chain preparation
• [02:06] Vera Rubin development update
• [04:16] China market commentary & regulatory outlook
• [06:20] Export permissions and compliance—no diversion policy
• [07:28] Power and energy as critical constraints
• [10:00] Partner discipline with OpenAI & Anthropic
• [12:23] GPU lifespan, software, and depreciation explained
• [14:49] Data center cost structure—clarifying Nvidia’s contribution

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Conclusion

Jensen Huang presents Nvidia as a meticulously managed, innovation-driven company, prepared to face operational scale, geopolitical hurdles, and global energy challenges on its own terms. The interview vividly illustrates Nvidia’s centrality to the current and next waves of AI compute—and why its technology (and business model) are so robust in a rapidly changing world.

Transcript

[Indiana University Announcer]

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[Jensen Huang]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

News we'd like to welcome Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to the program. And Jensen, it's been an astonishingly busy day for you in Washington D.C. so I'm grateful for your time. You're sold out of Blackwell, that's what you said. But also that $500 billion forecast, which is Blackwell Rubin has room to grow. How do those fit together?

[Jensen Huang]

I said sales are off the charts for Blackwell and Nvidia GPUs in the Cloud are sold out. We got plenty of black wells to sell you. We have lots of black wells coming. We're making a lot of black wells and we have a bunch of Vera Rubens coming. And so business is very, very strong. But we've planned our supply chain incredibly well. We have the largest supply chain in the world. Our partners, tsmc, our memory partners, sk, Hynix, Micron, Samsung are doing a fantastic job supporting us and all of our systems partners, Foxconn and Quanta and Wiztron, our packaging partners, everybody's doing a fantastic job supporting us. And we've done a good job planning for a very, very strong year. And we've done a good job planning for Vera Rubin. So sales are off the charts. Nvidia GPUs in the cloud is sold out. But we've got a bunch of Blackwells to sell.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Jensen, what's the road ahead for Vera Rubin? It's one of the most common questions we get for you of how that ramp will go relative to what we saw with the Blackwell generations.

[Jensen Huang]

Well, the silicon for Vera Rubin, seven different chips are back in our labs and the bring up is happening across engineering teams. Probably a couple of 20,000 people are working on bringing up Vera Rubin. From silicon to systems to software to algorithms, people are working around the clock. And this bring up is going beautifully. We're on track to deliver vera Rubin about Q3 timeframe of next year. Continuing our once a year cycle, Vera Rubin is already assured a huge success. Everybody's incredibly excited about it. Can't wait to show everybody. And then one last thing is that the rack architecture, the rack scale architecture is completely revolutionary. It includes a scale up switch called the MV link MVlink72. Our fifth generation is the only one of its kind in the world. This rack architecture which is incredibly complex, started with Grace Blackwell, then Grace Blackwell Ultra it is transitioned to Grace Blackwell Ultra is incredibly seamless. The same rack scale architecture is going to be used for Vera Rubin and so the supply chain is all used to it. This complexity that we enjoyed with Grace Blackwell Transition, we're now incredibly smooth running and so I think Vera Rubin is going to be just really smooth and we're going to ramp it really hard.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Jensen I tried to go through what the CFO Kress said about China in the quarter gone. It seemed like there was not meaningful 20 sales because the demand wasn't there. Even if you were permitted to sell H20 and then in the current period and going forward, Nvidia seems committed to working with both the United States and China to sell what Collect called more competitive compute. Where do we stand with that? And could you just clarify what Colette was talking about in the current state of play for China?

[Jensen Huang]

The most important thing she said is that we've said for some time now our forecast for China is zero. All of our forecast guidance that we showed zero, we should start. That's the most important thing that she said. She also said that effectively China is a very important market to us. It's very important to the United States. It's very important to China. We would love the opportunity to be able to re engage the Chinese market with excellent products that we deliver and to be able to compete globally. The Chinese market is very large this year. My guess is probably about $50 billion. It's great for the American people that we're able to compete in the Chinese market. It's great for the China market that we're able to provide Nvidia's technology to them. It's great for the rest of the world. As Chinese software companies and Chinese open source models leave China and are used all over the world. I think it's fantastic that we're able to. It would be fantastic if we're able to participate in the China market. But for now we should just assume the mark. Our Nvidia's forecast for China market is zero. We're going to continue to engage the US government, continue to engage the China government to advise them and to encourage them to allow us to go back and compete in the open market. And so until then we should assume zero.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Jensen during the call the U.S. commerce Department issued a statement saying that you are now permitted to export up to 35,000 Blackwell chips each to both Saudis Humane and to the UAE through G42. But there are some requirements that the US has of you. In particular around controls of preventing tech transfer to China through the Middle East. What can you tell us about your understanding of what the US government's asking of you there?

[Jensen Huang]

That element has been around for a long time, is to prevent diversion. Of course, over the years people have speculated about diversion. We've chased down every single concern and we've repeatedly tested and sampled data centers around the world and found no diversion. And so this is an area that we'll continue to be rigorous on. And there's a lot of different ways to comply. And one of them of course, is to have it be run by American cloud. Another way is just to make sure that we have measures put in place, whether technology or processes, to ensure that no diversion happens.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Jensen, the number one question I get for you is always about energy. How severe is the energy shortage in the context of AI expansion? And would you talk a bit about power and whether power is a bigger constraint for this build out than the chips themselves?

[Jensen Huang]

When you're growing at the rate and scale of Nvidia, remember we're growing some 60% a year. Just quarter to quarter growth of our company is $10 billion. We grew an entire size of a company just in one quarter. The scale and the rate at which we're growing, everything's a challenge. Which is the reason why Nvidia has to be world class at our supply chain, working with incredible providers and suppliers like TSMC and, and the memory partners and all of our systems partners, but also working downstream to work with energy providers, power generator companies, all of the land power and shell providers, so that we could make sure that as we launch into the marketplace, as we deploy into the marketplace, land power and shell will be ready for us. One of our great advantages is that we have such a large network of go to market every, we're in every single cloud, every single cloud service provider is a customer of ours. We're in every single GPU cloud. And so we have a large network. And not to mention OEMs, not to mention all around the world, our customer base, our network of partners is so large that we will find nooks and crannies of power in large scale, medium scale, small scale in different parts of the world. And so this is a huge advantage of ours. And it stems from the fact, Ed, that Nvidia's architecture literally runs every model. And today yesterday we announced a big news with Anthropic. And so now the Premier Frontier models, OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, Gemini, all the open sources, biological models, physical AI models, everything in the world runs on Nvidia and as a result of that, irrespective of which cloud provider you are, it is fantastic that we can deploy in your cloud because the offtake will be incredible.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Jensen, we can see where the hyperscalers are getting the money, where they have the money to deploy and build. But you mentioned anthropic. With Anthropic or indeed open AI, they have tens of billions of dollars of commitments around the world. Very simple. Like how do you know that open air is good for it, that it will be able to find the money?

[Jensen Huang]

Well, we're thoughtful along with OpenAI, thoughtful in aligning on and taking into consideration visibility of demand and their financing capabilities. All of that has to be in accordance, has to be aligned, has to be coherent before we start to build out. I think the ambition is large, but the execution is disciplined. That's really, really important to recognize. We're very disciplined with our investment, we're disciplined with our build out. These are very large scale investments. The two teams are quite disciplined, very disciplined in thinking through the investment levels. Now it's also important to take a step back and realize that OpenAI, anthropic, these are the fastest growing company in the history of humanity. Their offtake, their end market demand is absolutely real and absolutely incredible. You could see that they're really struggling to keep up with the demand that they have. The engineering teams, we work incredibly hard to make sure that we bring them on more capacity, but also optimizing their stack so that the usage of whatever capacity is as efficient as possible. And meanwhile there's so many new use cases that they want to put back put out into the world and is currently limited by the capacity they have. And so this is a really important time. You're seeing an exponential growth in the amount of compute demand necessary for AI. You're seeing an exponential growth of adoption and use of AI and the number of applications that are going to be using these AI is also growing. And so we've got to do our best to support the scaling out of two of the most consequential companies in history and we're delighted to be partnered with them.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Jensen Investors have been worrying about depreciation. Software can actually extend life. There are a 1/ hundreds out there in, in the real world still at full utilization. Are people underestimating how long your chips stay useful or are they kind of misunderstanding in the context of depreciation, how you're handling generation to generation updates of GPU?

[Jensen Huang]

Nvidia's architect Nvidia is unlike any other Accelerator. And the reason for that is because of CUDA's diversity of capability and versatility. Remember, I said two things earlier. I said the fact that Nvidia participates and could accelerate every phase of AI. Pre training, post training, and inference. We're the only architecture in the world that does that fantastically. The second thing we do is we run every single model. Most agentic systems, most clouds are running so many different diverse type of models. Language models, vision models, biological models, chemical models. For all the different fields of science, Nvidia could be used across the entire lifespan of the technology. If you look at products that we shipped, Ampere A100 we shipped six years ago. But because our install base is so large, our diversity is so great, we could continuously update our software, bring value to our customers on the one hand. But because our versatility is so great, based on the capability they need, they could use our GPUs for a very, very long time. Now remember, a 100 is six years old. However, it is still an order of a magnitude faster than any CPU could put to bear. So it is still the best computer. It is still the best processor for much of the workload in the cloud. And most people misunderstand that because unlike us, most accelerators are kind of singular use because they don't have diversity, because they don't have versatility, because they're not great at every phase of AI. Once they're used for whatever they were designed to do, their value falls off a cliff. That is not true with Nvidia.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Jensen, my final question is a point of clarification, if I may. You were asked on the call about content and Nvidia's contribution to any given piece of infrastructure. And what you said was, Hopper around 20 to 25, Blackwell about 30 with those figures. Billions of dollars in dollar terms on a 1 GW data center. Or we're talking about percentages of total cost.

[Jensen Huang]

Oh, thank you. Billions of dollars. Billions of dollars. Yeah. And so for our Vera Rubin system, a 1 gigawatt data center is probably something along the lines of 50 to 55. And Nvidia's contribution is probably about 35 of that.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

Nvidia CEO. 1 billion. Noted. I was asked to ask you the questions. Been asked and answered. Astonishingly. Busy day for you in the nation's capital. That's.

[Jensen Huang]

That's a great question. The difference between percentages and billions. A big deal. Yeah, it's in billions.

[Bloomberg Interviewer]

The stakes are high, but we're always grateful for your time. I know it's been a busy day. Thank you for joining us on Bloomberg Television. That's Nvidia CEO Jens Wong.

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[Jensen Huang]

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