Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google execs meet with White House to talk AI energy and data centers

Leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and several American power and utility companies met Thursday at the White House to discuss the future of artificial intelligence energy infrastructure in the U.S., sources familiar with the meeting told CNBC.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft president Brad Smith, Google President Ruth Porat and Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman all attended the meeting, which focused on bringing the public and private sectors together to talk about artificial intelligence's energy usage, data center capacity, semiconductor manufacturing, and grid capacity, sources familiar with the meeting confirmed.

The White House late on Thursday announced a new task force after the meeting to coordinate policy across government.

"We're at the beginning of a new industrial revolution," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC as he left the meeting. "This industry is going to be producing intelligence, and what it takes is energy... So we've got to make sure that everybody understands the needs coming, the opportunities of it, the challenges of it, and doing it in the most efficient and scalable way we can."

"There's probably going to have to be public-private collaboration in this area, because the rate of growth is really quite high," Huang said, adding that Nvidia is in the process of starting full-volume production for its Blackwell chip.

An OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC that the company believes building additional infrastructure in the U.S. is critical to the country's industrial policy and economic future. "We appreciate the White House convening this meeting as it is a recognition of the priority of infrastructure to create jobs, help guarantee