- Nvidia provided key updates on its latest chips at CES this week.
- CEO Jensen Huang offered fresh details on Rubin, its latest AI chip platform.
- But Eric Jackson thinks the top takeaway from Huang's talk is about more than just better chips.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang kicked off the new year by giving investors some key product updates at CES 2026, drumming up fresh bullishness about the chip titan's business.
At the high-profile industry event, Huang revealed that production has begun on Rubin, its six-chip AI platform and the follow-up to the popular Blackwell architecture.
The talk generated a lot of buzz about the future of AI demand and Nvidia's business outlook, but hedge fund manager Eric Jackson argues that the most important takeaway from the talk is much bigger than innovations in chip tech.
Jackson, who helped spur rallies in several stocks followed by retail traders last year, said that he thinks many investors missed the key takeaway from the event. In his view, the most important thing isn't that faster or more advanced chips are coming; it is that AI is being built as a utility-scale infrastructure designed to operate for decades.
"Most people watched NVIDIA's CES keynote and heard 'faster chips,''" he said. "That wasn't the message. The real takeaway was this: AI factories are now being planned years in advance — at the land, power, and shell level."
In short, he thinks these statements mean that AI is being treated like electricity or telecom networks, a technology that will serve as a fundamental part of everyday life.
"The CES + JPM conversations made it clear: AI factories are being planned like utilities — not experiments," Jackson noted. "That changes the slope."
As he sees it, the shifting industry landscape is poised to create more efficient AI production, which will lead to more demand for it through new use cases.
The investor highlighted the Jevons Paradox, an economic adage that argues that when a resource becomes more efficient to use, people consume it more, not less, despite assumptions. Economist William Stanley Jevons first introduced it in the 19th century to illustrate the growing dependence on coal.
"The market's obsession with 'capex slowing' misses the point," Jackson added. "If inference + agents + long-context workloads are compounding, power becomes monetizable for longer, not shorter."
Jackson added that recent AI market developments are feeding his bullish thesis on small-cap tech stocks like Hut 8, IREN, and Cipher Mining, as all three stand to benefit from an economy increasingly powered by AI.
"Most investors still ask: 'Is AI demand peaking?'" he wrote. "The better question now is: Who can deliver reliable power and uptime as AI becomes permanent?"
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