Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said society needs "new social norms" in the age of artificial intelligence, urging people to embrace the technology even as the machinery of corporate power and state regulation closes in around it. In an Associated Press interview Tuesday in Sherman, Texas, Huang said, "We need to create new social norms," and added, "I would advocate that everybody use AI. Just go engage it."
Who Gets to Set the Rules
Huang’s pitch came from the top of the tech hierarchy, where the people building the systems also get to define the terms of public life around them. He said AI could create faster economic growth and more scientific breakthroughs, and he described a future in which the technology helps people design websites, analyze complex documents, guide advanced research and plan a kitchen remodeling without needing to know how to program or write software. The sales pitch is familiar: accept the tool, adapt your life, and let the platform decide what counts as progress.
Huang said society will adapt to AI as it did to automobiles, saying cars were once portrayed as killing children but that the world changed its norms by adding sidewalks and crosswalks and stopping kids from playing in the streets. The comparison framed social change as a matter of adjusting ordinary people’s behavior around industrial power, rather than questioning who benefits from the system in the first place.
He said there should be some government regulation and safety standards for AI and that national security should be a priority. Huang said, "National security should always be the top concern of all technologies," and added, "But having said that, you know, you have to be very specific about the risk that you’re concerned about, before setting up policies for export controls."
The Costs Below, the Decisions Above
Huang said the United States is "woefully behind in energy production" and said, "We just suffocated energy production for too long." He said data centers used for AI are creating a huge demand for electricity and that some will be built with their own electricity sources. The burden of that expansion lands on the infrastructure, land, and energy systems that ordinary people already depend on, while the companies driving the demand keep scaling up.
He also said the expansion of the Coherent factory in Sherman, Texas, is aimed at developing a laser for transmitting data among chips and could cut power use by AI systems by up to 50%. The language of efficiency sits neatly beside the reality of ever-growing industrial appetite: more data centers, more electricity demand, more extraction, more control.
Huang said his close relationship with President Donald Trump has drawn criticism from Democrats. He said Trump invited him to dinner at Mar-a-Lago last year after Huang was in the area to receive the Edison Achievement Award for his AI work, and Huang said he went with his wife, Lori. The dinner table between a corporate executive and the president is where the public gets told what the future will be, while everyone else is expected to live inside it.
The Bosses Talk Jobs, Reindustrialization, and Winning
Huang said Trump was "incredibly engaging, incredibly charismatic, conversational, asked a lot of questions," and said, "From the moment that I met him, the only thing that he’s ever talked to me about is creating more jobs, reindustrializing the United States, protecting national security, winning." Huang added that Trump "calls me in the middle of the night and wants to talk about one of these topics."
Huang said, "We could differ with politics, but we should want him to succeed," and added, "Because when President Trump succeeds, our country succeeds." That line tied the fate of the country to the success of one president and the interests of one corporate executive, leaving the rest of the population as spectators in a managed contest of power.
Huang said his favorite movie is "Kingdom of Heaven," the 2005 epic about the 12th century Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, and said he had watched "Project Hail Mary" three or four times and thought he might watch it again that weekend. The interview, meanwhile, kept returning to the same core message: AI should be normalized, regulation should be narrow, energy should be expanded, and the people at the top should keep steering the apparatus.