Nvidia’s Jensen Huang tells G20 ministers AI infrastructure could cost $50B–$60B per gigawatt

Jensen Huang walked into a room full of G20 innovation ministers and made a pitch that would make utility executives blush. The Nvidia CEO told officials gathered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that building a single gigawatt of AI computing infrastructure would run somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion. For context, one gigawatt is roughly the power output of a large nuclear plant. Huang’s message was clear: if countries want to compete in the AI race, they need to start thinking about compute capacity the same way they think about roads, water systems, and the electrical grid. The Carolina gathering and what it produced The G20 Innovation Ministerial, held September 1-2, 2026, was co-hosted by the US Department of Commerce and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. It brought together innovation ministers from G20 member states alongside a roster of tech executives that read like a who’s-who of the AI industry, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Tom Brown. The group landed on two headline deliverables: the Carolina Principles for Emerging Technologies and the AI Prosperity Objectives Compact. Both documents center on four pillars: boosting res...