What to watch for after Jensen Huang’s Japan visit - TechCrunch

So Jensen Huang swanned into Japan and, because he's Nvidia's CEO and apparently the Wizard of Oz for the AI age, he's come away with a "national AI factory" deal. A national AI factory. Because what every country needs is a centralized neural cortex humming with GPUs, presumably powered by the souls of redundant data-entry clerks. Huang also signed up with "robotics firms" — because why not accelerate the physical replacement of humans while you're at it? And just to complete the triumvirate of inevitabilities, he locked in chip-material supplier agreements, ensuring the supply chain for all these delightful innovations is as frictionless as a guillotine blade.

Now, this is being reported as a "watch for" moment, as if Japan signing up to become a testbed for Nvidia's full-stack automation fantasy is something other than a hostage to fortune. The national AI factory will presumably churn out models that can write haikus about the end of the lifetime employment system. The robotics partnerships will no doubt produce humanoid waiters for restaurants that have already fired all their human staff. And the chip-material deals? That's just the infrastructure for the whole thing to scale until there's nobody left to buy the hardware.

But hey, Jensen got a nice trip to Japan out of it, and TechCrunch got another article to add to the "innovative synergies" pile. One can only imagine the conversation at the Japanese ministry: "So, Mr. Huang, you want to build a giant AI that can do everything, partner with robot companies, and secure our materials supply? Splendid! Just one question: who exactly is going to have a job when you're done?" Huang's answer, presumably, was to point at a graph going up and to the right. Marvellous.