‘AI is the US’s best opportunity to re-industrialise’: Nvidia CEO on AI and jobs

‘This is the part that people don’t realise about AI. The first thing that AI is doing right now is creating an enormous number of jobs. AI creates jobs. AI is the United States’s best opportunity to re-industrialise ourselves,’ Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a TV interview in May, a point he has repeated since.

In a more recent interview published by Nvidia, Huang said the company’s own software engineers are experiencing that shift directly, spending less time writing Python code and more time developing AI agents. ‘If you ask me, every one of my software engineers prefers to be building agents than to be writing Python code,’ he said.

Huang said engineers are increasingly focused on building agentic systems, benchmarks and guardrails rather than performing routine coding tasks, describing the work as requiring creativity even as it automates repetitive tasks. ‘You’re taking all the mundane work, and you’re trying to get this agent to do it. That requires imagination, that requires creativity, a lot of technology,’ he said.

AI agents are designed to break complex tasks into smaller steps, with each component handling a specific function toward a broader objective. Huang said this is generating new kinds of engineering work rather than eliminating jobs. ‘The amount of work that we have to do to bring AI into the world is really quite incredible. So it’s creating a whole bunch of jobs. And, my software engineers love this,’ he said.

Huang’s comments differ from concerns raised by some technology leaders about AI’s potential impact on white-collar employment. Unlike Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Huang has maintained that AI is creating new roles as companies develop and deploy the technology.