Jensen Huang Says Compute Power is the "New Natural Resource" of the Modern Era

"With Claude Opus 4.6 turning many of its users into believers, and GPT-5.3-Codex also taking the world by storm, it's hard not to think that the pace of AI advancement is starting to pick up again. Perhaps it's too fast for the comfort of many shareholders hanging onto their SaaS holdings. While the latest agentic wave of coding tools may very well pave the way for some form of AGI sooner rather than later."

"In the meantime, though, it's really hard to be an investor in the middle of a tug-of-war between the table-pounders and skeptics. The bulls are incredibly bullish, with expectations that digital labor could cause mass displacement that we're not ready for. At the same time, there are also skeptics who see a bubble who don't think the more than $600 billion spent by big tech this year will amount to a decent return."

"The stakes are incredibly high, either way. But given the action we've witnessed in tech markets in response to new releases from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, it's impossible to ignore. In any case, it feels like the main constraint for a more rapid advancement might lie in a lack of energy to get compute where it needs to be for the next generation of profoundly energy-intensive models."

"If hives of capable AI agents are poised to be run for hours without human oversight, that's going to result in a massive compute bill. And the infrastructure may not be there quite yet. And as shocking as some of the CapEx bills of the mega-cap tech titans are, it might be necessary just to get the ball rolling. As Jensen Huang put it, compute power is the "new natural resource.""

Rapid advances in generative models such as Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex are accelerating AI capabilities and renewing investor enthusiasm. Market sentiment is polarized between extremely bullish expectations of digital labor-driven disruption and skeptical concerns about an AI spending bubble, despite more than $600 billion in tech investments this year. The next phase of model development will demand far greater compute and energy, creating substantial infrastructure and cost challenges. Running agentic systems at scale could produce massive compute bills while data centers and energy delivery may lag. Compute power is emerging as a scarce natural resource essential for future progress.

Read at 24/7 Wall St.