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The recent AI meeting on the sidelines of G7 summit in France felt timely. It took far too long to have comparable regulatory discussions on social media, and the early signs of interventions are now visible. The meeting titled “Ensuring a Safe, Rapid, and Effective Deployment of Artificial Intelligence” sounded like the right thing to do. Yet after several searches, including the official G7 portal, I discovered it was a closed-door session, and only selective bits were released for public consumption. Hardly surprising, social media was soon abuzz, and some You Tube channels even claimed to know the full story.
The AI sector was mostly represented by first generation founders, including India’s own- Sarvam. NVIDIA was absent and Microsoft is still busy spacing out its founder. Some founders may have opted out as they don’t quite like to create their own shackles. Google and Meta are too influential to be left out, though they are considered ‘staid’ by the standards of ‘independent start-ups’. The reason I bring up these companies as they have the size and strength of balance sheet to invest on their own, while the independent start-ups bring the ‘snazzy quotient’.
Consider NVIDIA’s case. NVIDIA’s FY 2026 Annual Report quotes its CEO as follows : “AI will transform how we work—and how the world works. It will automate most tasks, reshape every job, eliminate some, and create entirely new ones. That is why it is important to distinguish between a task and the purpose of a job. Coding is a task; innovation is the purpose. AI will automate more tasks so people can do more of the work that matters” – To me the key word is ‘purpose’, which exactly makes unregulated AI so troubling
For a company that has grown its annual revenue from $ 61 Bn in 2024 to $216 Bn in 2026, and Net Income $ 29.8 Bn to 120 Bn, the performance has been dazzling. I queried AI if there is any listed company with net income % higher than NVIDIA’s 55%, and it tells me that only a few Investment Trusts, holding companies or Royalty and Intellectual Properties companies show higher percentage. It is worth noting that such specialized companies have often little ‘Sales’, so technically they can report income greater than 100% of sales.
NVIDIA’s success did not happen in stealth. It went public in 1999, when it generated a revenue of $158 M. Since then, its R&D spend has consistently exceeded every line item below Gross Profit in its Income statements. It’s no wonder that at $4.8 trillion it has the highest market capitalisation in the world today. Regardless of whether it retains that position in future, it is an exceptionally valuable company. As a provider of hardware, middleware and software, it provides infrastructure platform to all participants of the AI economy and therefore sits at the core of the current AI boom.
Interestingly, in September 2025 NVIDIA announced partnership to support OpenAI by investing upto $100 Bn progressively to build and deploy 10 gigawatts (GW) of AI data centres with NVIDIA systems and infrastructure. To bring it into perspective, 10 GW is more than the peak capacity needed to meet demand in a city the size of New York, London or Mumbai. The FY2026 annual report makes a reference to similar ‘guarantee’ by an innocuous sounding disclosure. As is the case, one has to wade through hundreds of pages to stumble upon such details.
Having spent a decade with Lucent Technologies and having seen the debacle that vendor guarantees and financing can cause, my ‘sceptic radar’ is naturally switched on. Some may remember Global Crossing of the Dot-com boom era of late 1990s, its pitch – “every company needs our fibre to get online” , then its bankruptcy in 2002, and the plight of its main suppliers who thought vendor financing was a clever idea. This piece is not about infrastructure over-building, but on regulating AI’s development responsibly. I am hopeful NVIDIA will not make the same mistakes of Lucent or Nortel. Still, one cannot help wondering whether companies such as NVIDIA prefer to be seen as ‘less in it’ , like the invisible “middleware” layer, thereby avoiding the lure of the snazzy quotient—or whether that is simply coincidence.
While I remain in awe of these brilliant founders, my sceptic radar stays on. An added AI layer to social media can devastate civil societies. Skills and labour are highly mobile, and the internet has made them easily accessible to those able and willing to pay the price. Whether its G7 or G195, what matters is the need for universally acceptable rules for AI’s growth and deployment. Until then, it will remain in the hands of investors- retail or large funds- to act as regulators. And that is an imperfect substitute for proper governance.
Jyoti Lahiri
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.