Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t think the artificial intelligence race will be decided in a single breakthrough.

On The Joe Rogan Experience, Huang cast AI’s acceleration as the latest chapter in a long-running global competition for technological advantage, one that has repeatedly redrawn geopolitical lines, from World War II through the Cold War.

“We’ve always been in a tech race with someone,” Huang said, likening today’s push for AI leadership to the Manhattan Project. The difference, he argued, is tempo: rather than a sudden, decisive finish line, AI will advance in waves, continuous gains that are easy to miss in the moment but obvious in hindsight.

That doesn’t mean the stakes are modest, according to the CEO of one of the biggest manufacturers of the the chips AI firms need to operate. Huang said AI systems have become roughly 100 times more capable over the last two years, a rate of progress that has fueled public anxiety about autonomous weapons and machines operating beyond human moral constraints.

Huang’s counterpoint: much of the momentum is flowing into functionality and safety, making systems more reliable, more useful and less error-prone, he claimed.

He also defended the U.S. military’s role in AI development, suggesting that defense involvement can normalize the technology’s place in national security rather than leaving it to shadowy, unaccountable actors.

Rogan pressed on a familiar set of fears: AI outpacing human judgment, and the longer-term threat that quantum computing could crack modern encryption. Huang pushed back, arguing that AI will remain “a click ahead," and that history is full of moments when society panicked over its newest inventions, only to adapt once the technology became legible and regulated.

If Huang has an ideal end state, it’s not a single winner hoisting a trophy. It’s something quieter: AI becoming infrastructure, fading into the background as it powers everyday systems, from healthcare to transportation, less a conquering intelligence than a new layer of computing people stop noticing because it simply works.

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