Chapel Hill (United States) (AFP) - Top US technology executives, including Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and OpenAI's Sam Altman, urged G20 ministers on Wednesday to embrace artificial intelligence and build the data centers needed to make it work.
First modification: 09/02/2026 - 22:11
These tech leaders spoke on the second day of a G20 meeting in North Carolina in which Donald Trump's administration brought together leading figures in the AI industry to present its vision to ministers from the world's largest economies.
"In the end, what every country will have to recognize is that (AI) is infrastructure, just like water, roads, electricity, the internet," Huang said.
Nvidia is the key company behind the generative AI craze, which has catapulted it to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
The company's graphics processing units (GPUs), housed in purpose-built data centers sprouting up around the planet, are the essential components for training AI models.
Threat?
Huang rejected the idea that AI poses a threat to jobs, one of the fears that has fueled public opposition to the technology.
"The idea that somehow all jobs are going to be eliminated or disappear... is simply nonsense," Huang told G20 technology ministers.
Work will be redefined, rather than disappear, he argued.
"Tasks will be automated, but the purpose of our jobs remains," he said.
Reflecting public concern, which is growing as the US midterm elections approach in November, the meeting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was greeted by a protest of between 100 and 200 people against the rapid development of AI.
Huang reserved his sternest warning for governments that insist on potential risks from the technology. "The worst outcome is that you don't take advantage of it, that you are left behind. That is, by far, the worst outcome," he said.
Huang also urged governments not to overregulate technology, echoing similar comments made by Elon Musk a day earlier.
- "Worry" -
In another session, Altman was less insistent on the issue of data centers.
"Some of you will choose to build data centers. Some of you will choose to rent data centers from other people because you don't want them in your country," he said.
"I think that's all good." But adoption itself is not optional, said the head of OpenAI, who compared a country that rejects AI with one that would have rejected electricity a century ago.
"It's non-negotiable. They have to use it," Altman said. "The value to a country is too high to ignore."
The executive took a more alarmist tone than Huang regarding the risk.
"Worry is justified. Worrying is how we anticipate problems," Altman said, drawing a parallel to the development of fire regulations.
Some of the ministers present in the room were more cautious.
Chris McDonald, the UK's science and technology minister, told AFP that no one disputes the opportunity the entrepreneurs described, but "clearly people who run companies have a different set of responsibilities to those who run countries," and he argued for a balance.
© 2026 AFP
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