Worship at the temple of infinite compute

A mythopoetic take on the GTC keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

Do you feel the biophysical constraints of the world?

Gravity. Time. Energy. Your body?

As inconvenient as they may seem, these constraints are part of what make life real. They’re not problems to be solved or limits to be transcended. They are sacred reminders. Of our embeddedness in this world. Of our interdependence with ecosystems. Of breath and diatoms. Soil and fungi. The slow churn of decomposition. Of each other and what it means to be Earthian.

This past week, I was reminded of this in the most visceral of ways. My grandmother, my Baba, passed away.

She was 90 Earthian years old. A strong, wise, deeply caring woman born in Croatia in 1934. She migrated to Australia in the 1960s with mostly nothing more than hope, grit, and a deeply Earthian intelligence and wisdom. She endured war, upheaval, and the challenges of raising a family in an unfamiliar land. She gave enormously, humbly, from the heart. And she endured. Including the slow, cruel dance with Parkinson’s, and the natural softening of body and mind that comes with age.

She finally let go at on the 19th of March 2025.

Her death brought me back to what matters.

To the fragility and finitude of this biological life. To the sacred gifts and the inevitable griefs of embodiment. To the beauty of our temporality. The cycles of breath, of bone, flesh and of memory.

Her passing was a sacred reminder of our biological limits. The ones so often ignored in the race toward "artificial intelligence" and infinite scale.

A reminder of what it means to be a human Earthian on this pale blue dot, spinning through space.

A starfield becomes scripture

A few days after my baba passed I found myself watching the 2025 NVIDIA GTC Keynote.

Why?

Well, I’m currently coordinating and teaching an MBA course on Leading Business Transformation in the Age of AI at the University of Wollongong. It’s a gift and a responsibility. A chance to co-create the conditions for the kinds of leaders this world so urgently needs.

So I tuned in to watch Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, and the high priest of compute in a black leather jacket deliver what was framed as a product keynote.

But I just want to pause here and note this isn’t an anti-tech rant.

I’m a creative technologist and moral imagineer. Someone who feels the electricity of possibility when extraordinary feats of human ingenuity, imagination and curiosity meet collective intent. Sometimes I am taken by it in my own states of flow with the glow of the screen. And I admire what NVIDIA and the broader ecosystem have made possible. The speed, the scale, the raw creative force of it all.

But I also know what’s missing from the narrative.

The trauma in the supply chains. The extraction buried in every chip. The power asymmetries widening beneath the surface. The ecological and energetic cost of feeding the machines.

And beneath all that, I feel and sense the deeper mythologies we’re unconsciously encoding into the socio-technical systems we build.

What I witnessed in that keynote wasn’t just about unveiling "the next wave of AI and accelerated computing".

It was a ceremony. A high-tech liturgy and myth-making cloaked in the language of silicon, scale, and salvation.

Now I am not going to unpack the whole 2 hour plus keynote. That would be a book. I'll focus on a few points mostly about the framing. But I do suggest watching this keynote in full, all the way to the end with the "cute" little R2-D2 WALL-E hybrid.

And first I want to start by unpacking the opening sequence. Because it wasn’t just visual flair.

It was scripture.

A cosmogyny in code

The keynote didn’t open with specs, chips, or benchmarks.

It opened with a void.

A digital starfield.

A visual field of infinite possibility. The aesthetic of space. Of scale. Of eternity.

Then numbers appeared.

Mysterious integers, drifting silently in the black.

1212. 318. 703. 4430. 925. 13.

At first glance: nonsense.

But slowly, these numbers resolved into language. As a female voice speaks, the phrase emerges:

And then, the words dissolve.

Letters scattered like particles in a simulated Big Bang.

Fragments of meaning floating in the dark.

From that swirling digital debris, a face began to form.

A glowing presence. Not quite human. Not quite synthetic.

First a mesh of points. Then texture. Then skin.

Eyes opened. A faint halo glowed. It's the avatar of the voice. Soft, feminine, synthetic.

This wasn’t just a demo.

This was a creation myth.

The emergence of intelligence from the cosmic void. Not biological. But computational.

A new genesis, narrated by a digital oracle.

“This is how intelligence is made. A new kind of factory, a generator of tokens, the building blocks of AI. Tokens open frontiers. They chart alien atmospheres, decode the laws of physics, and unravel the language of life. Tokens don’t just teach robots how to move. They bring joy, lend us a hand, and put life within reach.”

Read that again. They put life within reach.

As if we weren’t already living.

I’m going to focus on two slides from the keynote at about 20–30 minutes in. Slides and a surrounding narrative that encapsulate the colonisation of knowledge and the expansion of an extractive AI industrial complex that many seem all too willing to worship.

What was delivered by Jensen Huang and the NVIDIA team was not neutral storytelling.

It was techno-theology.

The void becomes the data centre. The face becomes the product. The token becomes the spirit.

And the factory. The NVIDIA GPU-powered AI gigafactory. Well this becomes the temple.

This isn’t just “branding.” It’s mythopoeia.

An origin myth for the machine age. Wrapped in stardust, spoken by the voice of synthetic benevolence, and delivered from the pulpit of progress.

It is breathtaking propaganda and reinforcement of the inevitable march of technological progress.

And… deeply concerning.

Because what happens when this story becomes the dominant cosmology?

When intelligence is defined by token throughput rather than relational depth with Earthians and the lands, skies and waters? When our shared future is imagined through the metaphors of industrial scale and computational supremacy?

The religion of scale

These tokens are not mere units of data, but are presented as divine sparks capable of decoding physics, curing disease, understanding life, and bringing joy. Tokens, the modern-day manna, falling from the corporate cloud and revered in the temple of techno-optimism.

Somewhat after the cosmogonic prologue, we’re ushered into the "inflection point" of this myth…

A towering graph, climbing year by year, bar by bar. The years and the price of belief in dollars. $1 Trillion+ projected global data centre capital expenditure by 2028.

There’s a certain awe to it. The aesthetic of inevitability and Moore’s Law metastasised.

“This is the era of the AI factory,” Huang proclaims. “We’re not just building chips, we’re building entire industries, reimagined as factories of token generation.”

But here’s what this slide doesn’t show (nor anywhere else in the keynote):

• The rare earth minerals ripped from the Earth to feed these machines.

• The water required to cool them... millions of litres per day.

• The carbon footprint of training and retraining models, ad infinitum.

• The landscapes razed to build hyperscale infrastructure.

• The communities displaced.

• The ecosystems ignored.

• The human labour exploited across global supply chains.

It does not show the dark mirror, those watching likely blinded by the light of the bright mirror. And Jensen says we are “scaling” but never asks what is the true cost to do so?

Now of course that is not gonna sell more stock, product and compute now is it?

This graph is not a neutral forecast. It is a sacred relic of the church of scale. It suggests that meaning and progress are proportional to capital expenditure and token-per-second throughput.

It presumes that intelligence is a function of infrastructure and compute power at the behest of everything else.

And it's a revealing of an industrial theology, where Earth is the substrate, computation is the gospel, and scale is salvation.

But what does this path lead to?

Well, that's alluded to in the bright mirror beginning that comes from the void of space.

A type 1 civilisation, exploring the galaxy that has colonised our epistemic past and generated the future from next token prediction at the cost of most of life on earth.

CUDA-X and epistemic colonisation

If the graph was the altar of scale, then this next slide is the doctrine of totalisation.

“CUDA-X for Every Industry.”

Glowing panels shimmer across the screen like digital tarot cards.

Each representing a domain of human knowledge.

Physics. Chemistry. Biology. Medicine. Weather. Engineering.

Gene sequencing. Quantum computing. Signal processing.

Decision-making itself.

Each discipline rendered legible, computable, and CUDA-compatible.

This is epistemic colonisation.

A refactoring of the world’s diverse, situated, pluralistic ways of knowing into one singular pipeline, one stack, one broligarchic proprietary paradigm of machine-readable reality.

A Walmartification of knowledge:

• Every aisle filled with precision-engineered abstractions.

• Every shelf labelled with optimised libraries.

• Every worldview reframed as a GPU workload.

Now the technologist and scientist in me thinks these tools are brilliant.

They offer the potential and real acceleration of insight, and likely even breakthroughs that will save lives.

But brilliance without reflection is blinding. Because behind this acceleration lies troubling assumptions:

• That all knowledge is best understood through the lens of computation.

• That the world can and should be fully abstracted, encoded, and optimised.

• That complexity exists to be conquered, not danced with in some elegant and divine mystery and rite of passage revealing.

What’s missing?

• The relational.

• The embodied.

• The unquantifiable.

• The ecological entanglements.

• The cultural contexts and Indigenous cosmologies.

• The mysteries that resist being tokenised, and must instead be witnessed.

CUDA-X offers tools for everything.

Tooling for industries and modern scientific advancement as it silently reshapes what counts as knowledge, and what is rendered obsolete in its wake.

This is the slow violence of epistemic capture. Where intellectual diversity and lived experience is replaced with technical homogeneity and reductive orthodoxy. And the infinite plurality of ways we know and be in the world? Well this must be flattened into vectorised efficiency.

Beyond the hype reflected in a bright mirror

Let’s not lie to ourselves here. This shit is completely absurd!

Of course, this was a commercial keynote. It’s meant to be some razzle dazzle. It’s meant to assure investors that the trillion-dollar AI arms race to the bottom is not only worth it. But it’s necessary.

A blinding reflection of a bright mirror, a future imagined by our tech broligarchs. Whether they don suits, hoodies and sneakers or black leather jackets. They all push a certain mythos. One where compute is god, and all that is living becomes data to be processed by the next token prediction magic they seem to want to wield like Saruman.

We are disembodying intelligence from its biological, relational, and ecological roots, and calling it progress.

And it’s not that hard to see this as a secular religion of endless growth, infinite compute, and disembodied cognition. Like a worshipping at the altar of abstraction, categorisation and colonisation, while the watersheds that keep us alive are sucked dry, and the elders and lands who've carried our stories slip quietly into the dark.

My Baba’s hands once pulled weeds from the earth with quiet reverence and deep care. I wonder what she’d say if she saw the slide and could make sense of it that claimed: “Everything will be accelerated.”

She’d probably smile, and say: “What a silly little man... why? Slow is good.”