In a recent talk, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang outlined his vision for a future where artificial intelligence and accelerated computing transform every industry and create a new $100 trillion “token economy.”
Huang noted that the world has installed about a trillion dollars worth of data centers, but that the era of general-purpose computing is coming to an end. “We cannot continue to process data that way,” he said. “The world is going to accelerate everything — data processing, AI, you name it.”
Huang noted that the world has installed about a trillion dollars worth of data centers, but that the era of general purpose computing is coming to an end. “We cannot continue to process data that way,” he said. “The world is going to accelerate everything — data processing, AI, you name it.”
The solution, according to Huang, is a wholesale shift to accelerated computing powered by GPUs. He predicts that over the next 4–6 years, we’ll have to replace about $2 trillion worth of computers with this new accelerated architecture.
But it’s not just a simple hardware upgrade. Huang sees this as a genuine industrial revolution, comparable to the rise of electricity. The key is that for the first time, we’re producing something entirely new at extremely high volume — what Huang calls “floating point numbers” or “tokens.”
“These tokens have value because they represent artificial intelligence,” Huang explained. “You can take these floating point numbers and reformulate them into language, proteins, chemicals, images, robotic controls — we’ve discovered how to produce tokens of almost any kind at extraordinary scale.”
Huang envisions a future where the world produces an enormous amount of these AI tokens in specialized data centers he calls “AI factories.” “Electrons go in, and floating point numbers come out,” he said, comparing it to how electricity was sold per kilowatt-hour in the last industrial revolution. “Now we’ll have millions of AI tokens per dollar.”
The implications are immense. Huang believes this will enable new products, services, and enhanced productivity across industries worth a staggering $100 trillion. Tools like what Stripe provides will be essential for monetizing and transacting in this new token economy.
“This new AI industrial revolution, driven by floating point number tokens, will be as transformative and incomprehensible to many as the electricity revolution was,” Huang declared. “But within 10 years, it will become completely normal. The AI industry is going to be gigantic.”
If Huang is right, the future of computing will look very different from the present — and the scale of the opportunity is truly mind-boggling. As AI continues to advance at a rapid pace, his vision of a token-based economy powered by accelerated computing may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. One thing is certain: NVIDIA plans to be at the forefront of this revolution every step of the way.
