Tesla's Elon Musk and Nvidia's Jensen Huang talk AI at U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum — 11/19/25

Minister of Communications and Information Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Your Excellency, thank you so much.

Good to see you. Also with us this morning are two incredible visionaries.

Please join me in welcoming to the stage Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, founder of XAI, and Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

Please, please have a seat.

Now, I'm sure we can do a bigger round of applause for one of the greatest two leaders of our history. Let's go ahead.

So, we're talking about I lost count, you know, 7 to8 trillion dollars worth of market cap comp. I lost count.

But right now we're here to celebrate a historic moment.

A moment that yesterday during the dinner and thank you for for joining us under the patronage of the honorable president and his royal highness the crown prince Musidi where we had the pleasure to hear it firsthand.

This is the greatest alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States where we have joined hands and you have helped us build our energy based economy fueling and energizing the industrial age and now fast forward going to the intelligence age where we can fuel AI factories robotics EVs and all of the rest.

Speaking of that, let's start with you, Elon, if you don't mind, Jensen, and feel free to chive in.

You have a big fascination of something all of us have admired, first order thinking, which Jensen sometimes calls first order scaling, which is an opportunity for how you have dropped the cost of batteries from a,000 for kilowatt hour to subund bucks.

And right now you're doing the same thing with robotics for actuators with servo rotors and motors.

So I want to hear from you.

How do you manage to always disrupt every single industry with that thinking?

>> Well, it's mostly not disruption, it's uh creation.

So with uh say SpaceX with the reusable rockets, uh there really weren't any reusable rockets.

Um, but the essence of getting of revolutionizing space travel is reusability.

If you throw the rocket away every time, the cost of access to space is extremely high.

Um, with respect to electric cars, there there weren't any electric cars when we started making them really.

You couldn't buy any to the best of my knowledge.

Um, so with Tesla, we wanted to make electric cars compelling um, and affordable.

That was the goal. Um the uh you know with respect to humanoid robotics, there are no useful humanoid robotics robots at this point.

Um there are sort of gimmicks, but there are there are no actually useful humanoid robots.

Um and I think Tesla's going to make the first actually useful humanoid robots.

Um and this will be quite a revolution and I think something that will that everyone will want.

Uh because I always think of like who who wouldn't want their own personal C3PO R2-D2.

>> Oh yeah, >> of course. Everyone would want one, right?

And and then there would be many in industry uh providing products and services.

This is why I say that humanoid robots will be the biggest industry or the biggest product ever.

Um bigger than cell phones or anything else because everyone's going to want one and uh or maybe more more than one.

And there will be many in industry.

Um, >> I just want R2-D2 in C3PO's body.

>> Yeah, >> there you go.

>> Well, I mean, a humanoid robot would be better than R2-D2 and C3vo combined.

>> Yeah.

>> Times 10.

>> Yeah.

>> So, the it and and you know, people often talk about uh sort of eliminating poverty and that kind of thing, but really the there's how long have they been talking about that? Um there's lots of talk uh you know there's lots of NOS's sort of trying to do these things but but really not succeeding um and and and you know the evidence speaks for itself uh but but but AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty and Tesla won't be the only one that makes them.

I think Tesla will pioneer this, but there will be many other companies that make humanoid robots.

But there there is only basically one way to uh make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.

>> And we can't talk about robotics without AI factories.

And yesterday was such a historic day for the two nations but also for all of us where we celebrate the AI strategic partnership with the US s signed witnessed by the honorable president and his royal highness about how we are committing our capital energy land to energize the AI US ecosystem to be able to build inference node training nodes and to be the most AI enabled nation with that announcement.

Tell me what's what's next in AI factories.

Jensen, >> there there's a there's a beautiful story about how Saudi Arabia's building AI refineries now building AI facil refineries to AI factories.

>> I love that.

>> I you know I've said that that AI is an infrastructure and the reason for that of course we understand AI from the perspective of the technology and how it's revolutionizing every industry.

Digital intelligence of course has applications into every every field and so it's going to be used by every company, every industry, every country.

In that way it's foundational and therefore it's part of infrastructure.

What is new about AI from a computer science perspective is that the way computing was done in the past was largely retrievalbased computing.

Somebody typed in a story or somebody created a a piece of art or came came up with four versions of a digital ad or it's all pre-built by somebody which is then using a system to retrieve the appropriate version for you.

It's a retrievalbased computing model.

Hadoop and many of the the the frameworks and operating systems of the past all designed to retrieve the appropriate information for you. But today software is going to be generated in real time.

It's generative based on the context, based on the circumstance, based on who you are, based on the problem you ask that based on your prompt.

It will generate unique content for you every single time for everybody. It's unique.

When you use Grock, every time you use it is different just based on right based on based on the based on the prompt that you give it and based on the circumstance and and so therefore it used to be retrievalbased today it's generative and if it's generative then and every time is different then you need AI factories all over the world to generate the content in real time which is the reason why you need AI factories and and this is a unique way of doing computation but the benefit of course is that Everything isn't preconceived and pre-documented and it's it's contextually s contextually sensible and and therefore intelligent.

>> So AI factories and robotics and we heard it yesterday from his royal highness his vision how to augment our workforce with roughly tens of millions of robotics to be able to infuse the next wave of productivity and progress.

But this scares a lot of folks here when it comes to the future of jobs.

So let's hear about your thoughts uh Elon and Jensen on that.

>> Uh sure.

Well um you say like in the long term where will things end up longterm?

I don't know what long term is.

Maybe it's 10 20 years something like that.

For me that's long term. Um my prediction is that work will be optional.

>> Optional.

>> Optional.

Um so >> we'll take that.

>> Yeah. I mean it it'll be like uh playing sports or a video game or something like that.

Um if you want to work uh you know in the same way like you can you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables or you could grow vegetables in your backyard. It's much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard but some people still do it because they like growing growing vegetables.

Um that will be what work is like optional.

Um and between now and then there's actually a lot of work to get to that point.

>> Mh. Um, and I always recommend people read read Yin Banks uh culture books to get a sense for what a probable positive AI future is like.

Um, and interestingly in those books, money is no longer doesn't exist. It's kind of interesting.

And I I my guess is in in if you go out long enough, assuming there's a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which there seems likely, the money will will stop being relevant at some point in the future.

Um now there will still be constraints on power like electricity and mass.

Uh the fundamental physics elements will still be still be constraints. Um but um I think at some point uh currency becomes irrelevant.

>> Jensen, any thoughts?

>> Um by the way, the Nvidia earnings call is later today.

>> And by the way, since currency is relevant.

>> Cheers.

Elon just wants to share with you some breaking news.

The two of us who like to share some breaking news.

Uh let's see. I I would say I would say there there's um different horizons you could look at.

Everybody's jobs will be different.

That I think that that's for sure. Uh how how the students learn will be different.

um uh how people do their work will be different obviously because a lot of the things that that we do mundanely or arduously or very difficultly are going to be done very simply and and so we're going to be more productive from that s from that sense one of the things that I will say is that for most people or a company if some if your life becomes more productive and if the things that you're doing uh with great difficulty becomes simpler it is very likely because you have so many ideas, you'll have more time to go pursue things.

It is my guess that Elon will be busier as a result of AI, I'm going to be busier as a result of AI.

And the reason for that is because we have so many ideas we want to pursue, so many things that that we still have in our backlog inside our company that we can go pursue. If we were more productive, we can get to those things faster.

And so in the near term I would say that that there is every evidence that that we will be more productive and yet still be busier because we have so many ideas.

One thing that I will say give you give you some evidence is that uh and I was just telling Elon about this earlier radiology for example has largely been uh converted to AIdriven radiology and there's some really great companies doing that and the surprising thing is the prediction that all radiologists would be the first jobs to go was exactly the opposite.

The trend shows that there are more radiologists being hired now as a result of AI.

And the reason for that, if you take a step back, it's because the goal of a radiologist is not to study the images.

The goal of a radiologist is to diagnose a disease.

Now, the studying of the images became so productive.

They could study more images, study more modalities, spend more time with the patients.

And as a result, they were actually accepting more patients.

We're doing more radiology all around the world.

We're doing a better job with diagnosing disease.

And so that's that's kind of the the nearterm near uh outcome of of uh AI and productivity.

And and we'll see we'll see what happens long term.

You know, I I when when currency doesn't matter anymore, just, you know, let me know right before.

>> You'll see it coming.

You'll see it coming.

like like >> we text often so just >> Yeah, we do.

>> Yeah, just text it off. Yeah, let me know.

>> I kind of I kind of agree with with both of you because if you look at every technological trend, every general purpose technology has been net new positive for for the globe for humanity and so forth. And let me share with you two nice >> statements and and your excellency I think it's precisely the reason the reason for that is because all the great ideas from from innovators like Elon that you have so many good ideas >> that and Jensen as well.

>> Yeah. Well, thank you.

>> So let me share with you two stories from two Saudi innovators in collaboration with a lot of great the great work that Nvidia does that Gro does.

One is professor Maryagi.

All right, let me say that again.

It's Professor Omaragi.

Who is >> I might need to >> might need to move the mic.

>> All right, >> here.

Come on. We'll share this one.

>> Get closer.

>> Let's let's let's try this one more time.

So one of them is professor Omaragi who's the first American Saudi to win a Nobel prize in creating new chemistry and the way he has done that he has leveraged your AI accelerators and models like Grock to be able to create new chemistry when it comes to metal organic frameworks.

Those are metal ions that are positively charged with organic linkers to be able to effectively create a sponge with 33 nanometers pores to capture water from air and also to capture carbon dioxide.

The second story has also to do with AI accelerated by Nvidia and with models like Brock which is nanop which is effectively creating a nano robot 500 nanometers by a,000 nanometers to be able to do gene editing leveraging the crisper technology to take out sickle cell disease.

Now in both these instances they originated 20 years ago in research but AI was able to really accelerate the outcomes and the outputs such that we can move into new value pools.

So I think with every technological trend humanity is going to always manage to shift to new value pools when it comes to workforce and productivity.

But we have some great announcements to talk about here today.

Let's begin with you Elon.

the things that we're doing with XAI.

Uh yeah, we're excited to announce that um we're doing a a a uh a 500 megawatt I mean yeah 500 sorry >> 500 megawatt >> 500 megawatt yeah >> we're doing 500 >> we're doing 500 megawatt >> sorry >> yeah yeah the 500 g one will have to wait um so um that that'll be eight bazillion trillion dollars Um, stop that.

>> Uh, so yeah, we we're we're doing a um XCAI and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are doing a a >> Humane 500 megawatt starting with 50 megawatts phase one and we're doing it with Nvidia.

Congratulations to the Humane team to target team.

Such a fantastic job. Jensen, I think we're also doing some great announcements uh this week.

We are we're announcing we're announcing all kinds of things. Um uh our partnership with Humane is is going incredibly well.

First of all, uh we we uh work together to get this company started and off the ground and just got an incredible customer with Elon. Could you imagine a startup company approximately zero billion dollars in revenues now going to build a data center for Elon 500 megawatts is gigantic. Uh this company is off the charts uh right away.

Uh in addition to that we're um uh working working uh AWS as you know is also >> congratulations to the humane team with AWS >> starting with 100 megawws with a gigawatt ambition and uh counting.

So AWS is also coming to Humane.

Uh we're working with uh Humane on Omniverse uh digital twins.

Uh as you know that AI is not just well just agentic AI and chat bots and uh cognitive AI is incredibly important to the world. Uh but AI applies to everything, chemicals and proteins and genes and physics and fluid dynamics and particles and of course robotics and activation and um and we created this world called Omniverse where robots can learn how to be good robots and and it's physically based.

It obeys the laws of physics and so robots can learn in these environments and we're working with Humane to apply Omniverse to all kinds of uh digital factories and robotics and warehouses and things like that. And so that's that's another uh we're we're also working uh in Saudi Arabia to build supercomputers to simulate quantum computers and and uh uh using our computers to be the controller and the error correction quantum error correction requires an enormous amount of computation and so so we're doing a lot of great work there too. So a big partnership with Humane they're off the charts um off the ground and off the charts at the same time. This is how we walk the talk in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in partnership with the US.

Yesterday, the president and his Royal Highness announced the AI strategic framework and partnership.

Today, we're going big with Elon and Jensen.

So, thank you for those opportunities.

Now, they they told me I have time for two last questions. So last night at the dinner I got a number of questions because it seems that the schedule leaked and uh everybody was giving me hints about the last two questions I'm going to do. So the first one was for you Elon and there's a big one for you Jensen.

So prepare for that one.

AI in space is that possible?

Uh yes, if if civilization continues, which it probably will, uh then AI in space is inevitable.

Um um you know, I always have to like preface that, you know, we shouldn't take civilization for granted.

We we need to make sure to take care to ensure that civilization has an upward arc.

I mean, any student of history knows that civilization does not always have an upward arc. And in fact, civilizations have life life cycles.

So hopefully we are in a strong upward arc.

I think we are for now. Um but we don't want to take that for granted or be complacent.

Um but the in order to the way to think of AI in space is that in order to achieve any meaningful percentage of a cautev 2 scale civilization where you're using even a millionth a millionth of the sun's energy you must have solar powered AI satellites in in deep space. Um so so that once you realize like once you think in terms of a kadeshv two scale civilization which is what what percentage of the sun's energy are you turning into useful work um then you then it becomes obvious that space is overwhelmingly what matters overwhelmingly.

the the sun only receives one roughly one two billionth of the earth only receives roughly u one two billionth of the sun's energy.

So if you want to have something that is say a million times more energy than earth could possibly produce, >> you must go into space. It's and and so um you know this is where it's kind of handy to have a space company I guess um sell the book.

>> Easier to cool chips in space too.

>> Yes.

>> Easier to cool chips in space. Yeah.

>> Yes. There's definitely no water in space.

So you're going to have to do something.

Yeah.

>> Uh that doesn't involve water.

>> Just hang out.

>> Well, it's you just got to radiate.

>> That's right.

Um so my estimate is that actually that that that the cost of of electricity like like the cost effectiveness of AI in space will be overwhelmingly better than AI on the ground. So far long before you uh exhaust potential energy sources on on Earth.

Long long before meaning like I think even perhaps in the four or five year time frame the lowest cost way to do AI compute will be with solar powered AI satellites.

So I'd say not more than five years from now.

>> Wow.

>> And just look at the supercomputers we're building together. Let's say each one of the racks is two tons.

Out of that two tons, 1.95 of it is probably for cooling, >> right?

>> Oh, yeah.

>> Just imagine how tiny that little supercomputer is, right? Each one of these GB300 racks will just be a little tiny thing.

>> And and just electricity generation is is already becoming a challenge.

>> Um so if you if you start doing any kind of scaling for both electricity generation and cooling, um you realize, okay, space is incredibly compelling.

Um so like let's say you wanted to do um I don't know two or 300 gawatt per year um of of AI compute.

>> Yeah.

>> Um it's very difficult to do that on Earth.

Uh the so the the uh US average electricity usage uh last time I checked was around 460 gawatts per year average usage.

Um so so something like say uh you know three 300 if you're doing 300 gawatts a year that would be like 2/3 of US electricity production per year.

>> There's no way you're building power plants at that level. Um and then if you take it up to say a terowatt per year impossible.

Yeah.

>> Like you have to do that in space.

>> There there just is there just is no way to do a terowatt uh per year on Earth.

Um and uh and and in space you you've got continuous solar.

Um you've got uh you don't you actually don't need batteries because it's always sunny in space.

>> Right. Exactly.

>> Um and um and and the solar panels actually become cheaper because you don't need glass or framing. Um and the cooling is just radiative.

So that's that's why I think >> that's the dream.

>> Yes, >> that's the dream. So Jensen, everybody last night was asking me and I'm mindful it's a earnings uh call for you today.

So I'm going to say this delicately.

Everybody has been asking me to ask you are we going to have an AI bubble?

That's the last question.

All right, let's all right let me well let me just hear you what we see. Okay, so so I I think it's really important when you look at what's happening around the world and go back to first principles of what's happening in computer science and computing.

There are three things that that's happening.

The first thing is that we all know that Moore's law has run its course and the ability that the amount of demand for computing versus the amount of computation we can get out of general purpose computing is really challenging and so the world's been moving to accelerated computing for some time.

We've been pushing this now for some over 20 years. Let me give you one statistic.

I was just at supercomputing six years ago.

Uh CPUs were 90% of the world's supercomputers, top 500 supercomputers six years ago. This year less than 15%.

Went from 90% to 10%.

And meanwhile, accelerated computing went from the other way, 10% to now 90%.

Okay, so you're seeing that inflection point, the transition in high performance computing from general purpose computing to accelerated computing.

Well, one of the one of the most data intensive one of the most intensive computation things that the world does in cloud is data processing.

Several hundred billion dollars of computation is done on just raw data processing. Has nothing to do with AI, just SQL processing, data frames, you know, everybody's names, address, their their sex, their their age, where they live, you know, how much money they make. All of that sits into a data frame.

And that data frame drives the world today. Whether it's in banking or you know whether it's in credit cards or of course e-commerce and everything from ad recommendation everything is driven off of that data frame that data frame costs hundreds hundreds of dollars to go compute and so that's the number one thing end of mors law the second thing is generative what the the last 15 years is called rexes recommener systems how do we know what information to recommend to us uh in a social feed.

How do you know what ad to recommend to somebody? Uh what book to recommend, what movie to recommend?

The world is the internet is so gigantic without a recommener system that a little tiny phone of us will have no chance of ever seeing the right information.

That Rexus is the engine of the internet today.

That's going generative AI. It used to be running on CPUs, now runs on GPUs. Which then says the third thing when if you just look at those two applications many of the internet companies can build enormous number of GPU supercomputers just doing that of course then it creates this the third opportunity on top of it which is agentic AI this is grock and this is open AI this is anthropic you know this is Gemini agentic AI sits on top of that but don't you know don't forget to think about what is happening above underneath ath what everybody sees as AI today.

There's a whole movement of computing from general purpose computing to accelerated computing and that if you just if you take that into consideration you'll come to the conclusion that in fact what is left over to fuel that revolutionary agentic AI is not only substantially less than you thought and all of it justified.

Well, I was just informed by the team that my boss and your bosses is going to talk next, the honorable president and his royal highness, the crown prince.

And hence, we ran out of time.

But in essence, this is a such so much love for you Elon and and Jensen. But this in essence is a 92 alliance that shifted from energy to digital to the intelligence age powered by pioneers such as Elon and Jensen to serve humanity and create on a net new basis new economies, new jobs and a better future for humanity powered by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Thank you for our lifetime partnership and friendship.

Thank you Elon. Thank you Jensen.

>> Thank you.

All right.

Ladies and gentlemen, what we just heard was a conversation about the future of technology spoken by the people building it.

To his excellency Abdullah Hailon Mosque and Jensen Huang, thank you for a conversation that did more than describe the future of technology.

It actually showed us who's building it and how.

And now ladies and gentlemen, we ask you to remain in the plenary. We will soon proceed with the special address by the leaders.

As his excellency Swaha mentioned, our leaders are about to arrive.

So the sponsorship recognition segment will take place after their departure.

And I just want to mention that uh his royal highness the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman Aiz aloud will deliver his speech in Arabic.

For English speaking guests, we have live translation devices available for you.

Our ground team will be more than happy to assist you. Thank you.

>> Waiting for sing his song.

So many dreams I kept deep inside me.

alone in the dark.

But now you've come along and you light up