The market value has exceeded trillion yuan, and "Yellow Dog" has become Huang Zong

Author | Gu Yue YidaoIn 2013, at the Xiaomi 3 press conference, a muscular middle-aged man gestured on stage and shouted "Xiaomi is mighty". Standing next to him, Lei Jun may not have imagined that ten years later, this man would become the "godfather of AI", strangling the lifeblood of countless technology companies

Author | Gu Yue Yidao

In 2013, at the Xiaomi 3 press conference, a muscular middle-aged man gestured on stage and shouted "Xiaomi is mighty". Standing next to him, Lei Jun may not have imagined that ten years later, this man would become the "godfather of AI", strangling the lifeblood of countless technology companies. The black high collar shirt of that moment was like the black leather jacket of this moment. Jensen Huang's exposure is about to catch up with Jobs in the iPhone 4 era. The carnival in the capital market made more people know Jensen Huang. A few days ago, the company he founded, Yingwei Dazheng, became the fifth largest technology company in terms of market value after Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon. In the past decade, blockchain, Metaverse, generative AI, big language model... Jensen Huang has stepped into the scientific and technological wind tunnel again and again as if he had never predicted. In the AI era, his GPU quietly monopolized the entire computing power market and became a crude existence.

"Men's Edition" Eileen Gu

In the eyes of many PC players, Jensen Huang is far from being as honest as he seems.

Due to the high price of Nvidia 40 series graphics cards and the shrinking materials compared with previous generations of graphics cards, Jensen Huang is called the "yellow dog" with exquisite knife skills.

Yes, for a long time, the impression of ordinary consumers on Nvidia has remained on the "game graphics card".

However, the fact is that the game business has abdicated from Nvidia's largest revenue point. In particular, after entering the 2023 fiscal quarter, the revenue of the data center business soared, accounting for 64% of the total revenue in Q3, becoming a major contributor to Nvidia's performance.

The term "data center business" here specifically refers to GPU accelerated computing services provided for scientific computing, enterprise computing, machine learning, and CUDA accelerator services provided for structured data analysis, graphics processor AI, and virtualization.

From the name, these businesses are more ToB than ToC. Jensen Huang has found a more profitable way than selling consumer chips to players.

Not long ago, in his graduation speech at National Taiwan University, he put a higher hat on this matter, "helping Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci of this era complete their careers

Jensen Huang delivers a speech at the graduation ceremony of Taiwan University

Jensen Huang's speech at the NTU was brilliant, and golden sentences frequently appeared, such as "whether you are chasing food or not being treated as food, you must keep running", "suffering is the pain on the way to pursue the vision", "frankly facing mistakes and humbly seeking help is the most difficult for smart people".

The image of an entrepreneur who has gone through various hardships, never gives up, and ultimately stands at the top of a commercial empire slowly rises.

But for those who are familiar with him, these are too "chicken soup". The real Jensen Huang is not such a success teacher, but a paranoid, courageous, enthusiastic and aggressive "alien entrepreneur".

In 1963, Jensen Huang was born in Taipei. As a child, he moved to Thailand with his family. However, due to the turbulent situation, at the age of nine, he and his brother were sent to the United States by his parents to live with his uncle and aunt who had just immigrated to the United States.

My uncle's family had poor financial conditions, so he sent the two of them to a rural boarding school in Kentucky.

Jensen Huang talked about this experience when he was a guest of Shanghai Satellite TV's "Bostan" program in 2009. He said, 'It's more like a correctional institution than a school.'. Some children carry knives with them, and there are also young gangsters covered in tattoos.

In such an environment, as a weak minority, Jensen Huang learned a keen sense of vigilance and a will to fight without fear. And these qualities will have a profound impact on his career and life in the future.

Jensen Huang as a student

However, due to the harsh environment, he also inevitably contracted the habits of theft and smoking. Fortunately, his parents also came to the United States two years later and rescued the brothers and sent them back to normal schools.

The yellow people can bear hardships, and the "curly" nature of learning seems to be innate, and Jensen Huang has also well inherited this.

He studied very well and exhibited outstanding talents in science and engineering. In sports, he also plays table tennis quite well, reaching the third place in the world youth table tennis competition.

Today, it tastes like Eileen Gu.

However, Jensen Huang took another path. Out of his interest in technology, he first studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University, and then received a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University.

He follows a path of half work and half study, and he is also working while studying.

In his junior year, Jensen Huang joined AMD as a chip engineer. After working at AMD for two years, Jensen Huang changed his job and went to another chip company, LSI Logic, which focuses on graphics processing functions, to do sales, which lasted eight years.

"Moving from the engineering department to the sales department was the best career choice I ever made, and I gradually learned how to integrate product design and development with the market. Because I realized that consumers don't care about which business school you graduated from, they only care about one thing, and what benefits your products will bring to them." Jensen Huang once said.

In 1993, Jensen Huang founded Nvidia

Ten years of experience in the chip industry, as well as the comprehensive experience in development and sales, has brought Jensen Huang's understanding of chips to a high level. He understood the different technological paths of chips in the future and also realized the different needs of future customers for chips. At the age of 30, he decided to establish his own company.

After thinking for a long time, Nvidia was born.

Money cannot be refunded

Jensen Huang's bigotry and boldness were revealed in his early entrepreneurial journey.

Nvidia's first product, NV1, is a graphics card that integrates 2D display and 3D acceleration functions.

At that time, 2D graphics card and 3D accelerator card were two completely different products, but Nvidia integrated these two functions into one video card. The idea is great, but the cost is high. In addition, the square drawing rendering technology developed by Nvidia is incompatible with the mainstream triangle drawing rendering technology on the market.

The high price and compatibility problems have caused NV1 to have a poor response on the computer. Nvidia failed to get off the ground and spent more than half of its startup capital. The company reduced its staff from 100 to 30.

Seeing the company in jeopardy, Sega, the game console manufacturer, has become the savior of Nvidia.

Since the game console does not need to consider compatibility issues, and Sega's Saturn game console is looking for a chip with both 2D and 3D performance, Sega chose NV1, becoming Nvidia's largest customer.

Sega Corporation, once ranked alongside Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft as four major game mechanism manufacturers

After the first cooperation, Sega hoped that Nvidia would develop a new NV2 chip for its own host Dreamcast, and allocated $7 million.

During the development process, Sega found out that the square drawing rendering technology was defective, so Nvidia switched to the mainstream triangle drawing rendering, and sent engineers to assist in the development.

Generally speaking, for the first party who rescues themselves in the midst of fire and water, the second party will not only follow orders but also do its best to meet their needs.

But Jensen Huang was wrong. He just thought that square drawing was better and did not adopt Sega's opinion, which led to the failure of NV2's final research and development, and indirectly led to the difficult birth of Dreamcast.

If Sega asks Nvidia to return the money at this time, Nvidia will probably go bankrupt directly if it runs out of ammunition. So Jensen Huang went to negotiate righteously. Although the development failed, the money still had to be paid.

I don't know whether Jensen Huang was too good at talking or Sega was too kind. As a result, the $7 million did not really need to go back, so Nvidia stayed alive.

However, in order to reduce costs, Sega, who was severely weakened, had to replace customized components with ready-made components to create Dreamcast, but the performance improvement was limited. After the release of Sony's PS2, it collapsed and ultimately sold only 10 million units, making it one of Sega's biggest commercial failures. Then Sega completely withdrew from the console market and reorganized into a pure game developer.

Sega Dreamcast host

As a result, Jensen Huang's bigotry and boldness trapped a partner, but also saved his own company.

Repeated failures have made Jensen Huang attach great importance to the choice of technological paths and will actively absorb new technologies.

According to Nvidia employees, Jensen Huang can read a lot of papers. He often goes to supercomputing conferences, takes charge of front-line engineers, assigns them tasks and checks the progress. In chip startups, he is the one who has the deepest understanding of new technology details.

Over the years, Nvidia has done several important things, including releasing CUDA, launching DGXstation, and acquiring Mellanox. These major technological decisions have been successful, but behind them is a CEO who truly loves and understands technology.

Love is reflected in many aspects, such as Jensen Huang's speech.

Many CEOs can tell the history of entrepreneurship and package it into a touching story, but not all CEOs can handle hard core things such as technical details and industry foresight.

On May 29, 2023, Jensen Huang delivered a keynote speech/Visual China at COMPUTEX

Jensen Huang often drags out his speeches on the Rostra for two hours. When he releases new technologies, he shows that he is familiar with everything. If he is not enthusiastic and proficient, he can't finish it.

A combative nature

Although looking back on entrepreneurial experiences after success may embellish those stories as' what doesn't kill me only makes me stronger ', in reality, business battles are mostly extremely cruel, especially in the stock market where fighting is a battle of death and death.

Jensen Huang has a title of "the most aggressive man in the chip industry".

How to understand this "aggressive"? You can compare it with Luo Yonghao, who challenged Apple when he first entered the mobile phone industry, or you can think of Yu Chengdong, who is "far ahead".

Jensen Huang was never afraid to offend others. He bombarded Intel when he just started his business. "Even if the graphics computing capacity is increased by 10 times, it is not as good as Nvidia.". For his friend AMD, he directly said that there is a "9 to 0" gap between the other party and himself.

He believed that Nvidia could build its own advantages by breaking Moore's law. In 1999, he put forward the "Huang's Law" in the field of graphics chips, which was later called together with Moore's law, that is, the performance of display chips doubled every six months. The product update speed, which is three times faster than Moore's Law, has enabled NVIDIA to establish its position as the mainstream of the industry.

He predicted early that the computer industry had entered a new revolution, and new computers based on artificial intelligence would completely replace old computers.

Jensen Huang

After the failure of the acquisition of ARM, he was mocked by some media that "it is difficult to become Jobs after all", but he laughed scornfully, "if the acquisition is not successful, it will not matter, and it will not hinder the continued development of Nvidia".

He talks big, he speaks big, he speaks big, but later on, these wild words come true.

Jensen Huang

Jensen HuangJensen Huang

Jensen Huang16

2007Jensen HuangCUDAGPU

GPU computing is not unique to Nvidia, but Nvidia vigorously promotes the development of CUDA, and nearly all its GPUs are equipped with CUDA cores. CUDA has gradually become the standard equipment in GPU computing.

Jensen HuangGPU /

CUDA56Jensen Huang

But he remained steadfast, recognizing it and never turning back, just like when developing NV2 back then.

Jensen HuangCUDA15CUDA3D

To do AI now, you must buy Nvidia's graphics card. There is no other way.

Because of the first mover advantage and continuous investment, CUDA has become an industry standard in the ecosystem and AI field, and this is Nvidia's deepest Moat.

Of course, this does not mean that Nvidia can rest easy. The threats of monopolists often come from invisible competitors and paradigm changes. The same applies to overtaking on 5G curves and the disruption of electric cars over gasoline cars.

Jensen Huang30

Although I am not impressed by his speech at National Taiwan University, there is one sentence I believe, 'Keep running'. Whether it's running to grab food or seeking refuge, in the rapidly changing field of technology, no one is an eternal giant.

Enterprises that are prepared for danger may not necessarily lead, but they will not fall behind.

The illustrations in the article are partly from Visual China and partly from the internet

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