- Huang shared his thoughts on 5G
- He also said he wished the investment had been $2 billion
- "A lot of it is just chemistry," said Huang when asked why the company invested in Nokia and not another vendor
NVIDIA GTC, WASHINGTON DC – Nvidia sent ripples through the telecom world on Tuesday with the news that it plans to invest $1 billion in Nokia. The surprise news left us with a ton of questions — and we had the chance to pose three to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Why Nokia?
What is Nvidia trying to achieve with the partnership? How does this deal jibe with Nvidia’s focus on having 6G “made in America”? And why Nokia rather than, say, Ericsson, which has a larger U.S. manufacturing footprint as far as wireless technology is concerned?
After quipping that he wished the $1 billion investment had been $2 billion instead, Huang said “Nokia knows telecommunications like no one knows telecommunications and we really enjoy our partnership with them. A lot of it is just chemistry."
Huang explained that Nokia is working on integrating Nvidia’s ARC computer and Aerial platform (which turns Nvidia’s CUDA programming framework and library into a radio network) into its base stations so different network services can run on top.
But he added that Nvidia’s platform is open and if other companies want to use it, they can. He pointed to Nvidia’s collaborations with Fujitsu, NTT Docomo and SoftBank in Japan to deploy technology that is “essentially ARC” as examples in this vein.
“I think this is the beginning of a new journey. ARC is a brand new computing platform for us and a brand new business for us. I think this has a great chance of being a multi-billion-dollar business for us, if not larger than that,” Huang said.
5G failure
Perhaps the most interesting part of Huang’s commentary were his thoughts on 5G, which he repeatedly characterized as a key area of failure for American technology leadership.
“The United States should still be the global standard of telecommunications. The United States should be today the world leader on 5G. It makes no sense to me that we’re not,” he said. “Somebody made some policy decisions that caused the United States to lose telecommunications leadership and as a result the world is not built on American technology today.”
The goal, he added, is to prevent that from happening when it comes to 6G and – more importantly – AI.
“We’re going to reinvent 5G, we’re going to get America into the 6G race and get back into creating technology for telecommunications,” he said. “We’re going to start setting standards. We’re going to make American technology what the rest of the world builds on. That’s called ARC.”