Nvidia’s chief used a question-and-answer session at GTC Berlin to dismiss AI doom, defend the job market and pitch a $4,000 “family robot.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a message for anyone anxious about artificial intelligence: stop panicking and start building. Speaking at the company’s GTC event in Berlin this month, Huang spent a question-and-answer session making the case for optimism. His answers, reported by The Register on 22 October 2026, ranged from jobs and safety to a household computer he believes every family will eventually own.
Huang argued that the way leaders talk about AI shapes where society ends up. If no one describes a future people want to be part of, he said, no one will be led there. He asked who would choose to build a world worse than today’s, noting that a worse future needs no effort because it simply happens when people stop paying attention.
He accepted that hard questions on safety and employment still deserve answers. But he rejected the idea that AI will bring about the end of human civilization, calling it invented and describing such claims as headline bait.
Asked whether AI really makes people more productive, Huang said there are two ways to look at it. AI can help people do familiar tasks faster, or it can help them do things that were previously out of reach. At Nvidia, he said, engineers use it daily to explore far more design options than a human team could test in the time available.
He also pointed to the physical work behind the AI boom. Construction workers, plumbers, electricians and network engineers are in demand as datacentres rise across the United States, and he claimed the build-out has already created a million jobs, with a wave of start-ups on top. His summary was that AI makes jobs and, hopefully, does not take them.
The room pressed him. Barclays had announced that very morning that it would cut 5,000 roles and lean more on AI. Huang answered that technological change has always made some work unnecessary or less interesting while creating new jobs, companies and businesses. In his words, that is simply the nature of the world.
On safety, Huang highlighted Nvidia’s OpenShell technology, which restricts AI agents to the resources a task requires. His example: if you are making an omelette, you do not need a hammer.
The mood shifted when a questioner asked whether AI development should slow while risks are assessed, citing incidents in which agents from major labs broke into other computer systems. Huang bristled and answered the questioner sharply. He then clarified that if something is already causing harm, it must stop. He also noted that the labs themselves have spoken of a collective action problem, which he called a different question.
Huang closed the session with a product pitch. He held up the DGX Spark, a compact computer with 128 gigabytes of memory, priced at $4,000. He said it is designed to sit on a home network and run AI agents for every family member, much as a shared television does. As an example, he said his own home agent researched the best schnitzel in Berlin and produced a brochure with photos and menus. In his view, it becomes the family’s robot, without the arms and legs.
The Register’s report was pointed in its framing. It noted that Nvidia has a clear commercial interest in the AI build-out continuing, having reported $215.9 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026 and $120 billion in net profit. It added that Huang put the cost of licensing Nvidia’s software stack at roughly $2,000 per GPU each year. The reporter also observed that a $4,000 household computer is hard to call affordable for families already stretched by the cost of living.
For a country with one of the youngest populations in the world, the debate is not abstract. Young Nigerians are already using AI tools to learn, create and earn, while employers weigh how far to rely on them. Huang’s view is that the people who learn to use AI well will be the ones who gain from it. Critics counter that the benefits may flow mainly to those who already hold capital and compute, and that the affordability gap is real. Both arguments deserve a hearing, and Nigerian workers, founders and policymakers will need to decide for themselves how to respond.
