NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has done it again. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco on September 10, the AI chip empire’s chief executive not only reiterated he is “confident” in growing NVIDIA’s revenue 70% next year — he declared that cybersecurity is highly likely to become AI’s next blockbuster application market, while dismissing the wave of AI extinction fears as manufactured marketing: “What better way to create demand than to create a problem?”
A Double Declaration at Goldman Sachs
According to Insider, Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha and Axios, Huang told the conference that as AI-generated code accelerates, software vulnerabilities will be created, attacked and patched at ever-faster speeds — triggering explosive demand for security tooling. He predicted that after coding, cybersecurity will be AI’s next “blockbuster” use case, with AI security systems operating around the clock.
NVIDIA has already positioned itself: strategic partnerships with CrowdStrike, Cisco and Palantir are in place, and it is co-developing an AI defense system called SafeMind with CrowdStrike — a “superintelligence” security layer designed to counter increasingly autonomous cyberattacks. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz joined Huang onstage at Fal.Con 2026, where the two warned that cyberattacks will grow “exponentially” — the window between attack launch and effective defense has been compressed to just 27 seconds.
“Manufactured Demand”: Huang’s Most Controversial Line
The remark generating the most heat is Huang’s response to AI doom narratives. Asked about runaway-AI risk, he suggested security vendors are deliberately amplifying threats: “What better way to create demand than to create a problem?” He described some “hysterical” extinction predictions as a business-generation tactic for the cybersecurity industry.
The timing makes the comment explosive. Just a day earlier, an Anthropic researcher resigned over safety concerns, warning that self-improving AI could pose extinction-level risks by 2030. OpenAI’s Astra model has already crossed the “critical cybersecurity” threshold, capable of autonomously finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities. AI safety researchers and security practitioners are locked in debate over whether AI is a defensive tool or the threat itself — and Huang’s “it’s just business” take poured fuel on the fire.
The Business Logic Behind 70% Growth Confidence
Huang’s optimism is grounded in numbers. NVIDIA’s Q2 revenue more than doubled to $96.2 billion, with AI data center demand still surging. He stressed that NVIDIA’s investments and M&A “only target surefire winners,” and that recent bets — including Thinking Machines Lab — are built on real customer demand rather than market hype.
Framing cybersecurity as “AI’s next battlefield” aligns perfectly with NVIDIA’s hardware dominance: AI defense systems require massive inference compute, and platforms like SafeMind run on tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs. In other words, whichever side wins the AI cyber war, compute demand wins either way — that is the underlying arithmetic of Huang’s “cybersecurity gold mine” thesis.
Analysis: Opportunity and Controversy in Equal Measure
From a market perspective, Huang’s call has data behind it: CrowdStrike cites an 89% surge in AI-enabled attacks, the global cybersecurity talent gap keeps widening, and AI-automated defense is one of the few AI applications with near-certain demand. But his “extinction talk = sales tactic” framing has drawn criticism — with Anthropic staff resigning in protest and regulators worldwide sounding alarms, attributing all safety anxiety to commercial motives risks understating the genuine capabilities of frontier AI systems.
For enterprises and developers, the signal is clear: AI-driven security will be one of the most important tracks of the next 12 months — whether adopting AI-powered defense tools or hardening attack surfaces against AI-accelerated threats, early positioning matters.
Conclusion
Jensen Huang once again played the prophet: reassuring capital markets with a 70% growth outlook while opening a new AI cybersecurity front for NVIDIA. His swipe at AI doom fears will keep sparking controversy, but the new normal of “AI versus AI” attack and defense has already taken shape. When attacks take 27 seconds and defense must run 24/7, cybersecurity becoming AI’s next gold mine may not need prophecy — it is already happening.
