Jensen Huang proclaimed that "AGI has arrived," noting that OpenAI's flagship model, Astra, was trained on over 100,000 NVIDIA chips. His major announcement that "400,000 GPUs are coming online" sends a strong signal of surging demand for computing power.
$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declared that the era of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has officially begun, attributing this historic milestone to OpenAI’s latest flagship model, Astra—which was trained on NVIDIA chips. This statement once again positions NVIDIA as the dominant force in AI infrastructure and hints at an imminent large-scale expansion of computing power.
On Sunday, Jensen Huang posted on X to congratulate the OpenAI team, stating that "AGI has arrived" and revealing that Astra was trained on more than 100,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72 chips. He also indicated that "400K GPUs are coming online," sending a strong signal that NVIDIA's computing supply is poised for another significant leap.
This announcement holds direct implications for the market. NVIDIA's data center business has become its core growth engine, and Huang's preview of an additional 400,000 GPUs suggests that order demand from leading AI clients continues to expand.
Astra Launch: OpenAI Labels It the "Smartest" Model
OpenAI released Astra last Thursday, positioning it as "the world's smartest and most human-aligned model," capable of "performing the most demanding professional tasks with unparalleled speed, precision, and judgment." At the launch event, OpenAI President Greg Brockman told the media, "Welcome to the AGI era."
Brockman further predicted that when people look back on history, they will consider AGI to have emerged "around this time, and I think it might be this model." "Personally, I do believe we have arrived," he said. Astra began rolling out to users this week.
OpenAI defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work," and positions Astra as a major research breakthrough marking a fundamental shift in the boundaries of tasks that can be entrusted to AI.
Ongoing Controversy: Disagreement Persists Over the Definition of AGI
However, not everyone agrees with this declaration. Prominent AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus directly pointed out that Jensen Huang is "jumping the gun."
"Jensen Huang provided neither evidence nor a definition; to me, this looks like an attempt to impose a corporate will on a scientific question," Marcus wrote on his Substack. "Declaring victory without a definition only adds to the confusion."
Marcus subsequently outlined his own ten criteria for defining AGI, noting that Astra meets only one or two of them. "By prevailing definitions, Astra still falls short," he said.
Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has adopted a cautious stance toward the concept. He recently stated on the "Sources" podcast that AGI is, at best, "a term with a highly ambiguous definition. I was inclined to say it is more akin to an inconsequential marketing buzzword."
NVIDIA: The Core Pillar of AI Infrastructure
Regardless of how the debate over the definition of AGI unfolds, NVIDIA’s position as the core computing power supplier for leading AI companies is undisputed. In a financing announcement in March this year, OpenAI referred to NVIDIA as "the cornerstone of our infrastructure," stating that "our training clusters and the majority of our inference stack continue to operate on NVIDIA GPUs."
Frontier AI companies such as Meta, Anthropic, and Google are also heavily reliant on NVIDIA’s high-end chips. This demand has translated into impressive financial performance for NVIDIA—the company reported quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion in August this year, representing a year-on-year increase of over 100%. Revenue from its data center business reached $89.0 billion, serving as the primary driver of growth, driven largely by operations including AI chips.
In a post on X, Jensen Huang stated that the next batch to go online would comprise 400,000 GPUs, further reinforcing external expectations regarding NVIDIA’s momentum in expanding computing capacity. From ChatGPT to o1, and then to Astra, every technological leap over the past four years has been built upon the foundation of NVIDIA’s continuously upgraded chips.
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