Jensen Huang, who founded NVIDIA in the early 1990s and built it into one of the most valuable companies in the world today, has thought a lot about AI's impact on global energy and climate systems.

Jensen has much to say about AI's potential benefits for energy innovation, power demand for AI, and a range of related topics, as David Sandalow — the inaugural fellow here at the Center on Global Energy Policy — learned when interviewing him.

Today, we're bringing you their conversation in full from the AI Energy and Climate podcast which originally aired in April of this year.

Jensen and David explore why AI requires so much energy, but also how the technology can actually reduce energy consumption in applications from weather forecasting to manufacturing. Jensen describes innovations like silicon photonics that could save megawatts of power in data centers, and he shares a few ideas for using AI to improve efficiency in the industrial and power sectors. Moreover, he explains his vision for what he calls "AI factories" — and how they could be powered in ways that can reduce strain on the grid.

Jensen Huang is the president of NVIDIA, which he founded in 1993 to advance accelerated computing. In 1999, NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 which it called "the world's first GPU". It became a key enabler of PC gaming and computer graphics, and ignited the era of modern AI.