Why did Jensen Huang skip AI Impact Summit? Nvidia explains CEO's sudden India no-show

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang cancelled his visit to India this week after falling ill following weeks of extensive travel, the company said on Tuesday amid speculation over his absence from the India AI Impact Summit.

Nvidia’s managing director for South Asia, Vishal Dhupar, said Huang was “under the weather” and had deputed executive vice president Jay Puri to lead the company’s delegation at the event.

“Jensen has travelled for three straight weeks, he caught a bug,” Dhupar told reporters during a virtual briefing. “We hope he is well soon, but we are delighted that we have Jay Puri leading a delegation to come here in India.”

“Aren’t we all missing Jensen? Everywhere I am going, everyone is asking (about) Jensen,” Dhupar added.

Nvidia last week said that Huang was unable to travel “due to unforeseen circumstances”, adding that a senior delegation led by Puri would attend the summit to celebrate India’s AI ecosystem.

India, with its large base of developers, startups and technology partners, has become one of Nvidia’s most important hubs for artificial intelligence innovation, Dhupar said.

Nvidia is collaborating with Indian cloud providers including Yotta, L&T and E2E Networks to build so-called AI factories aimed at meeting rising demand for computing power.

Organisations across sectors are also deploying Nvidia’s Nemotron and NeMo Curator platforms to develop multilingual AI applications for public services, finance and enterprise operations.

In India, adopters of Nemotron and NeMo Curator include BharatGen, Gnani.ai, CoRover.ai, National Payments Corporation of India, Sarvam.ai, Tech Mahindra and Zoho, among others, the company said.

Dhupar likened artificial intelligence to a “five-layer cake” spanning energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications, saying Nvidia is working with Indian partners at every level of the stack.

Today, around 800,000 developers in India are building, training and deploying AI solutions on Nvidia platforms, he said, adding that more than 100 Nvidia partners are showcasing products at the summit.

Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable technology companies, sits at the centre of the global AI boom, designing graphics processing units that power data centres used by tech giants, startups and governments racing to deploy next-generation artificial intelligence systems.

Its chips power data centres worldwide, making them critical infrastructure for tech giants, startups, and governments racing to build next-generation AI systems.