It was a year ago that Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang shocked the markets with a bold prediction. In a call with analysts following the company’s fiscal second-quarter 2026 earnings results, Huang predicted that artificial intelligence infrastructure spending would reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion by the end of the decade. It was an ambitious prediction, particularly considering that research firms such as Grand View Research believe the entire AI market — not just infrastructure — would be valued at $3.5 trillion by 2033. Huang’s forecast is only for infrastructure — it doesn’t include software or enterprise applications.
“The last couple of years, you have seen that capex has grown in just the top four CSPs [cloud service providers] by — has doubled and grown to about $600 billion,” Huang told analysts at the time. “So we’re in the beginning of this build-out, and the AI technology advances has really enabled AI to be able to adopt and solve problems to many different industries.”
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A lot has changed since then. Cloud companies continue to build data centers, but there are definite headwinds in the AI space. Shortages of processors, memory chips, and data storage devices threaten to limit the pace of the build-out and AI revenue growth. Foundries are operating at full capacity. And leaders of top AI firms are publicly pushing for a slowdown in frontier model development, citing risks that AI technology lacks enough guardrails.
But Huang is undeterred. And speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia & Tech conference last week, he doubled down on his year-ago prediction that AI infrastructure would be worth $3 trillion to $4 trillion in 2030.
“The semiconductor industry is going to just keep getting larger and larger, which is what we’re seeing now [with] these two fundamental ideas, that we have a new layer of computing with a new application and the end of Moore’s law,” Huang said. “Meanwhile, people are expecting these AI models to be smarter and smarter because they don’t like wrong answers. Then the compounded result of that should result in a very large industry.”
Nvidia’s numbers speak volumes
If anything, Nvidia’s most recent earnings report backs Huang’s position that the AI build-out has plenty of room to run. Revenue in its fiscal 2027 second quarter (which ended July 26) was up a whopping 106% year over year to $96.2 billion. Of that total, $89 billion was data center revenue, which was up 117%.
