At first glance, asset manager BlackRock and chip giant Nvidia seem to have little in common. Yet there are some parallels between this pair. The two companies are leaders in their respective market, for instance. 1999 was the year that both BlackRock and Nvidia made their début on Wall Street. This fact was pointed out by Larry Fink, CEO of the finance group, when he took to the stage alongside Nvidia boss Jensen Huang at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 21 January 2026. Since its IPO Nvidia has posted a total return averaging 37% p.a. Over the same period, BlackRock has put in an annual performance of 21% on average. “Not so bad for a financial services company”, Fink remarked smugly. Yet he called Nvidia's outperformance an indication of his counterpart's leadership skills. Fink congratulated Huang on his success. “We have many more years of that journey ahead of us,” the BlackRock-CEO predicted.<\/p>\n
Nvidia has evolved from the leading specialist in graphics cards to the major player in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. The Californian company is driving this mega-trend with its high-performance processors. Speaking in the packed Davos Convention Centre, Jensen Huang offered a vivid explanation of the enormous change that AI will entail, citing medicine as an example. While artificial intelligence helps radiologists analyse scans, it can also relieve nursing staff of the task of creating patient files, giving both professions more time for those in their care. AI, according to Huang, will not destroy any jobs. Indeed, he sees it creating many new posts. In the view of the charismatic manager, AI is not a singular technology. Instead, Huang compared it with a five-layer cake made up of energy, chips and computing infrastructure, cloud data centres, AI models and, finally, the application layer.<\/p>\n
As evidence of the uninterrupted progress of artificial intelligence, the Nvidia boss offered the venture capital (VC) market. The share of venture finance that is flowing into companies in the AI sector has actually risen sharply. In 2021 they accounted for only one tenth of global VC, but last year the proportion topped 60% for the first time (see chart). The greatest share, said Huang, went to AI-native companies from the healthcare, robotics, manufacturing and financial services industries. These are the areas in which AI models are already so good that they can be built upon. The manager urged those politicians present in the hall to treat this emerging field of technology in the same way as electricity or roads. “AI is infrastructure,” he emphasised. It is his belief that the world is undergoing the greatest infrastructure construction in its history right now.<\/p>\n
At the end of the discussion, which lasted a good half an hour, Larry Fink turned the conversation to investment: “We need to make sure that the average pensioner and the average saver is part of that growth.” The two panel speakers were in agreement that infrastructure is the key here, as it is the only way for the application layer of the AI cake to make progress. This will actually necessitate an expansion in the energy supply if the growing power demand of data centres, for instance, is to be met. Jensen Huang expressed himself convinced that infrastructure in particular offers a huge investment opportunity. “Get involved!” was his concluding appeal.<\/p>\n
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As at 17 February 2026; source: OECD<\/p>","adHoc":false,"headline":"Artificial Intelligence: the infrastructure of the future","imageThumbnail":"/contentAsset/resize-image/8ecafb94-1328-4a6f-8dd1-713730ccce2b/fileAsset/w/770"}