MUMBAI: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, dressed in a leather jacket, received a rock star welcome at the company’s AI India Summit on Thursday (Oct 24), with passes sold and tech enthusiasts spending thousands of rupees to travel to the event.
The reception Huang received in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, is reminiscent of the “Jensanity” seen in other parts of the world, notably Taiwan, as his popularity increases with the rise in Nvidia’s skyrocketing profits and multibillion-dollar market valuation.
The event, where the A US company has revealed plans to supply its AI chips to Reliance Industries and other Indian companieshad to be delayed more than half an hour due to the crowd, which an Nvidia employee said was “easily a few thousand.”
“It was Coldplay, but for techies. The passes were all sold out,” said Yuvraj Mehta, a robotics engineer for an AI startup that is part of Nvidia’s incubator program, referring to the British rock band .
Two engineers, who declined to be named, said they spent a total of more than 40,000 rupees (US$476) to travel to Mumbai to attend the summit from Surat, Gujarat state. , to the west, and Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana, to the north.
CEOs of major technology companies enjoy great popularity in India, where engineering degrees from universities, including the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), are seen as a path to prosperity.
But some attendees said that even among them, Huang — who made Nvidia the dominant supplier of processors essential to generative AI — stands out.
“He’s a hero.” “He is a hero in the academic and student communities, as well as the AI ecosystem community,” said Akash Bansal, founder of robotics startup Orangewood Labs.
