Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that, over the next four to five years, a trillion dollars' worth of data center infrastructure and hardware will be built across the world.

Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Huang was responding to reports that OpenAI head Sam Altman is seeking as much as $7 trillion to build the infrastructure for artificial general intelligence.

Huang said that compute advances will mean such a huge financial endeavor is not required, noting: "You can’t assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much."

But, even with the advances, he said that the rise of AI would cause data center spending to rocket. “We’re at the beginning of this new era," he said.

"There’s about a trillion dollars’ worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we’ll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world."

Nvidia is itself worth $1.7 trillion after the AI boom pushed its valuation past Amazon and Google, thanks to its dominance of the AI chip market.

The company is set to report fourth-quarter earnings on Feb. 21.