The semiconductor industry must grow five to tenfold over the next decade to support the coming wave of autonomous software agents and robots, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Speaking with Bloomberg this week, Huang argued that the current computer industry is insufficient to handle a future where computing demand shifts from human users to artificial intelligence systems.
Agents and robots as the next compute wave
Huang believes the next phase of computing will be driven by agents and robots that operate around the clock. He suggested that instead of a billion people using computers, the world will see 100 billion agents and billions of robots all consuming computing power.
“In the future, we have AI agents and robots, and they will be using computers,” Huang said. “Computers are being built not just for people to use, but computers are being built for computers to use.”
This shift requires a massive rethinking of backend infrastructure. As API requests come from agents more often than people, traditional assumptions around rate limiting and session memory begin to break down. The environment changes when most traffic originates from autonomous background loops rather than human interaction.
The 5-10x forecast Huang framed as a personal estimate, not a certainty, builds on a message he has repeated for months. He recently declared traditional coding dead in favor of engineers who build AI agents. This perspective reflects the growing need to build backend systems for autonomous systems and machines, a requirement infrastructure teams are already contending with.
Nvidia describes this transition as the move from generative AI to agentic AI — systems “capable of perceiving, reasoning, planning, and acting” — as the next major phase of the industry.
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South Korea’s infrastructure role
To support an endpoint explosion of this scale, the physical supply chain must scale dramatically at the memory and data center layers. Speaking at the AI Summit in San Francisco on July 24, Huang pointed to South Korea as a critical component of the global AI buildout.
“This is truly the beginning of a golden age for Korea,” he said. The country’s semiconductor and industrial capabilities position it to help the world build out AI infrastructure.
Nvidia announced a partnership with SK Group valued at over $500 billion. The initiative spans massive purchasing of next-generation High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) from SK Hynix, jointly co-developing custom HBM4 roadmaps designed specifically for agentic and physical AI workloads, and deploying Nvidia supercomputers.
The announcement also included major infrastructure investments across South Korea. SK Telecom plans to build a 2-gigawatt AI data center using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture and SK Hynix’s HBM4 memory, with the first facility expected to come online in 2027. At the same time, Nvidia will invest $1 billion in Naver Corp, with Brookfield funding up to $9 billion as the project’s infrastructure capital partner. This funding will help expand the company’s AI data center capacity from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts by 2028.
Huang’s prediction helps explain why Nvidia and other infrastructure companies are locking up supply years in advance. The company recently disclosed $119 billion in supply-related commitments as it works to secure everything from advanced packaging capacity to power, land, and high-bandwidth memory.
Techs Top 25 Disrupters of the Year often highlight the massive infrastructure required for this transition.
