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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI will ‘probably’ bring 4-day work weeks: ‘Every industrial revolution leads to some change in social behavior’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the world is “at the beginning of the AI revolution,” and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across industries could bring “probably” a transition to four-day work weeks, marking another shift in social behavior akin to previous industrial revolutions. But that doesn’t mean life will slow down.
“I have to admit that I’m afraid to say that we are going to be busier in the future than now,” Huang told Liz Claman on Fox Business Network’s The Claman Countdown. He pointed to AI’s uncanny ability to take time-consuming things and get them done very quickly, and predicted that the way this will actually work is to realize the ideas of more business leaders with many ideas in their heads, like himself. “I’m always waiting for work to get done because I’ve got more ideas,” he told Claman, adding that he thinks “most companies have more ideas than we know what to pursue. And so the more productive we are, the more opportunity we get to go pursue new ideas.”
“Every industrial revolution leads to some change in social behavior,” Huang noted in a wide-ranging interview, predicting that GDP will grow and productivity will increase. Certainly his company is growing. Huang was speaking to Claman in the aftermath of Nvidia’s record $46.7 billion second quarter earnings announced just a few days beforehand. His company still has a market capitalization north of $4 trillion, the largest in the world.
Bank of America Research has predicted a sweeping productivity boom for the S&P 500 as companies learn to do more with less, solving the “productivity paradox” that has been a characteristic of much of the computer age: you can see the revolution everywhere except in the productivity statistics. BofA Research’s Head of US Equity & Quantitative Strategy, Savita Subramanian, told Fortune this was partially, but not entirely, due to AI. The key is the same thing identified by Huang: doing things more efficiently. “If you’re productive, you are doing things more efficiently, you need less labor. And this is more labor efficiency than anything else.”
Extraordinary growth and demand for AI
Huang emphasized that AI capabilities now touch nearly every sector, from cloud computing to manufacturing, robotics, and even self-driving vehicles. He detailed the explosive growth in demand for Nvidia’s AI chips, especially their new Blackwell Ultra architecture (code-named GB300), fueled by surging global investments in data centers. Huang estimated that through the end of the decade, about $3 to $4 trillion of AI factory infrastructure will be built out.
Looking to the future, Huang acknowledged both anxiety and excitement about AI’s effect on work.
The interview also touched on the geopolitical tension of chip exports to China and the Trump administration’s stance on licensing. Huang positioned US technology as a potential global standard, remarking, “Having the world build AI on American tech stack helps America win.” Nvidia remains eager to resume China shipments, which could reclaim a share of a $50 billion AI hardware market there.
The 4-day week is already reality in some places
Fortune highlights that several companies pioneering the four-day work week have seen notable wins: productivity climbed by up to 24%, burnout was halved, and turnover dropped sharply. Large-scale studies in Britain and North America found that workers can accomplish the same results in around 33 to 34 hours weekly—and the drop from five to four days led to significantly better health, job satisfaction, and a dramatic reduction in sick days and quitting rates, suggesting that the current five-day work week is largely performative.
In the Netherlands, Fortune has reported, workers routinely put in just 32 hours a week, enjoying the quality-of-life improvements that come from a four-day schedule. Employees overwhelmingly want to keep the shorter week after pilot programs end and organizations that switch to them rarely revert to five days, supporting Huang’s assertion that industrial revolutions bring lasting social change.
Huang noted that with the advent of modern capitalism, the seven- or six-day work week evolved into a a world of five-day work weeks. “Every industrial revolution leads to some change in social behavior,” he said, adding that he expects the economy to be doing very well because of AI and automation.” He returned to the hotly debated impact on jobs, where Huang has been optimistic and peers such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have predicted that 50% of white-collar work will vanish. “Some jobs will go away,” Huang said. “Many jobs will be new and invented. But one thing for sure, every job will be changed as a result of AI.” He added that he believes “life quality will get better, of course, over time.”
Nvidia declined to comment further.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
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Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said her party will remove all net zero requirements on oil and gas companies drilling in the North Sea if elected.
Badenoch is to formally announce the plan to focus solely on “maximising extraction” and to get “all our oil and gas out of the North Sea” in a speech in Aberdeen on Tuesday.
Reform UK has said it wants more fossil fuels extracted from the North Sea.
The Labour government has committed to banning new exploration licences. A spokesperson said a “fair and orderly transition” away from oil and gas would “drive growth”.
Exploring new fields would “not take a penny off bills” or improve energy security and would “only accelerate the worsening climate crisis”, the government spokesperson warned.
Badenoch signalled a significant change in Conservative climate policy when she announced earlier this year that reaching net zero would be “impossible” by 2050.
Successive UK governments have pledged to reach the target by 2050 and it was written into law by Theresa May in 2019. It means the UK must cut carbon emissions until it removes as much as it produces, in line with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Now Badenoch has said that requirements to work towards net zero are a burden on oil and gas producers in the North Sea which are damaging the economy and which she would remove.
The Tory leader said a Conservative government would scrap the need to reduce emissions or to work on technologies such as carbon storage.
Badenoch said it was “absurd” the UK was leaving “vital resources untapped” while “neighbours like Norway extracted them from the same sea bed”.
In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak granted 100 new licences to drill in the North Sea which he said at the time was “entirely consistent” with net zero commitments.
Reform UK has said it will abolish the push for net zero if elected.
The current government said it had made the “biggest ever investment in offshore wind and three first of a kind carbon capture and storage clusters”.
Carbon capture and storage facilities aim to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from industrial processes and power stations from being released into the atmosphere.
Most of the CO2 produced is captured, transported and then stored deep underground.
It is seen by the likes of the International Energy Agency and the Climate Change Committee as a key element in meeting targets to cut the greenhouse gases driving dangerous climate change.
Esme Stallard and Justin RowlattClimate and science team
Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesIt is smaller than your fingernail, but this hairy beetle is one of the biggest single threats to the UK’s forests.
The bark beetle has been the scourge of Europe, killing millions of spruce trees, yet the government thought it could halt its spread to the UK by checking imported wood products at ports.
But this was not their entry route of choice – they were being carried on winds straight over the English Channel.
Now, UK government scientists have been fighting back, with an unusual arsenal including sniffer dogs, drones and nuclear waste models.
They claim the UK has eradicated the beetle from at risk areas in the east and south east. But climate change could make the job even harder in the future.
The spruce bark beetle, or Ips typographus, has been munching its way through the conifer trees of Europe for decades, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
The beetles rear and feed their young under the bark of spruce trees in complex webs of interweaving tunnels called galleries.
When trees are infested with a few thousand beetles they can cope, using resin to flush the beetles out.
But for a stressed tree its natural defences are reduced and the beetles start to multiply.
“Their populations can build to a point where they can overcome the tree defences – there are millions, billions of beetles,” explained Dr Max Blake, head of tree health at the UK government-funded Forestry Research.
“There are so many the tree cannot deal with them, particularly when it is dry, they don’t have the resin pressure to flush the galleries.”
Since the beetle took hold in Norway over a decade ago it has been able to wipe out 100 million cubic metres of spruce, according to Rothamsted Research.
‘Public enemy number one’
As Sitka spruce is the main tree used for timber in the UK, Dr Blake and his colleagues watched developments on continental Europe with some serious concern.
“We have 725,000 hectares of spruce alone, if this beetle was allowed to get hold of that, the destructive potential means a vast amount of that is at risk,” said Andrea Deol at Forestry Research. “We valued it – and it’s a partial valuation at £2.9bn per year in Great Britain.”
There are more than 1,400 pests and diseases on the government’s plant health risk register, but Ips has been labelled “public enemy number one”.
The number of those diseases has been accelerating, according to Nick Phillips at charity The Woodland Trust.
“Predominantly, the reason for that is global trade, we’re importing wood products, trees for planting, which does sometimes bring ‘hitchhikers’ in terms of pests and disease,” he said.
Forestry Research had been working with border control for years to check such products for Ips, but in 2018 made a shocking discovery in a wood in Kent.
“We found a breeding population that had been there for a few years,” explained Ms Deol.
“Later we started to pick up larger volumes of beetles in [our] traps which seemed to suggest they were arriving by other means. All of the research we have done now has indicated they are being blown over from the continent on the wind,” she added.
Daegan Inward/Forestry ResearchThe team knew they had to act quickly and has been deploying a mixture of techniques that wouldn’t look out of place in a military operation.
Drones are sent up to survey hundreds of hectares of forest, looking for signs of infestation from the sky – as the beetle takes hold, the upper canopy of the tree cannot be fed nutrients and water, and begins to die off.
But next is the painstaking work of entomologists going on foot to inspect the trees themselves.
“They are looking for a needle in a haystack, sometimes looking for single beetles – to get hold of the pioneer species before they are allowed to establish,” Andrea Deol said.
In a single year her team have inspected 4,500 hectares of spruce on the public estate – just shy of 7,000 football pitches.
Such physically-demanding work is difficult to sustain and the team has been looking for some assistance from the natural and tech world alike.
Tony Jolliffe/BBCWhen the pioneer Spruce bark beetles find a suitable host tree they release pheromones – chemical signals to attract fellow beetles and establish a colony.
But it is this strong smell, as well as the smell associated with their insect poo – frass – that makes them ideal to be found by sniffer dogs.
Early trials so far have been successful. The dogs are particularly useful for inspecting large timber stacks which can be difficult to inspect visually.
The team is also deploying cameras on their bug traps, which are now able to scan daily for the beetles and identify them in real time.
“We have [created] our own algorithm to identify the insects. We have taken about 20,000 images of Ips, other beetles and debris, which have been formally identified by entomologists, and fed it into the model,” said Dr Blake.
Some of the traps can be in difficult to access areas and previously had only been checked every week by entomologists working on the ground.
The result of this work means that the UK has been confirmed as the first country to have eradicated Ips Typographus in its controlled areas, deemed to be at risk from infestation, and which covers the south east and east England.
“What we are doing is having a positive impact and it is vital that we continue to maintain that effort, if we let our guard down we know we have got those incursion risks year on year,” said Ms Deol.
Tony Jolliffe/BBCAnd those risks are rising. Europe has seen populations of Ips increase as they take advantage of trees stressed by the changing climate.
Europe is experiencing more extreme rainfall in winter and milder temperatures meaning there is less freezing, leaving the trees in waterlogged conditions.
This coupled with drier summers leaves them stressed and susceptible to falling in stormy weather, and this is when Ips can take hold.
With larger populations in Europe the risk of Ips colonies being carried to the UK goes up.
The team at Forestry Research has been working hard to accurately predict when these incursions may occur.
“We have been doing modelling with colleagues at the University of Cambridge and the Met Office which have adapted a nuclear atmospheric dispersion model to Ips,” explained Dr Blake. “So, [the model] was originally used to look at nuclear fallout and where the winds take it, instead we are using the model to look at how far Ips goes.”
Nick Phillips at The Woodland Trust is strongly supportive of the government’s work but worries about the loss of ancient woodland – the oldest and most biologically-rich areas of forest.
Commercial spruce have long been planted next to such woods, and every time a tree hosting spruce beetle is found, it and neighbouring, sometimes ancient trees, have to be removed.
“We really want the government to maintain as much of the trees as they can, particularly the ones that aren’t affected, and then also when the trees are removed, supporting landowners to take steps to restore what’s there,” he said. “So that they’re given grants, for example, to be able to recover the woodland sites.”
The government has increased funding for woodlands in recent years but this has been focused on planting new trees.
“If we only have funding and support for the first few years of a tree’s life, but not for those woodlands that are 100 or century years old, then we’re not going to be able to deliver nature recovery and capture carbon,” he said.
Additional reporting Miho Tanaka
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