Nvidia has managed to exceed all expectations. The company’s market capitalization has increased by 160% to $3.10 trillion within the last six months. The rush for artificial intelligence has made the chipmaker the third most dear company on the earth, only Apple ($3.30 trillion) and Microsoft ($3.25 trillion) are higher.
It’s been an equally meteoric rise for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Huang’s wealth has increased by greater than $62 billion this yr, to $106.1 billion, and he has overtaken fellow tech star Michael Dell to turn out to be the thirteenth richest person on the earth.
But the person behind Nvidia’s historic rise doesn’t sugarcoat how difficult the road to success was – neither for himself nor for the corporate he founded over 30 years ago.
When Nvidia launched in 1993, Huang and co-founders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem initially had the concept of developing chips that may enable realistic 3D graphics on PCs – or graphics processing units, especially for video games.
But I speak on the Assets Brainstorm Tech Conference in 2018Huang told the audience that he at all times believed that GPUs could have broader applications in society, otherwise “there would have been no point in starting a company.”
“It is incredibly difficult to start a company, it is incredibly difficult to start a business,” Huang said on the conference. “The depth of despair, suffering, anguish – balanced by the great joy of doing something the world has never done before – is indescribable. So if you don’t believe you’re going to make a real contribution to society, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to embark on this journey.”
The reason Nvidia entered the gaming industry, in keeping with Haung, is because video games are the one area of technology where the computing power is incredibly advanced, but at the identical time there is big demand from consumers.
Once they realized the potential scale of GPU servers, Huang says they were capable of gain a foothold in workstations, supercomputers, self-driving cars and, ultimately, AI. But all of that was only possible through PC gaming.
“3D graphics and video games are the engine of innovation in our company, the engine of [research and development] scale,” he said on the conference.
Huang has made other, more moderen comments that paint an image of entrepreneurship that’s anything but idyllic.
During a podcast interview in fall 2023, Huang was asked what form of company he would start if he could turn back the clock 30 years. The former engineer and current manager had a somewhat surprising answer.
“I wouldn’t do it,” he said.
“If we recognized the pain and suffering [involved] and the way vulnerable you are going to feel, the challenges you are going to should undergo, the embarrassment and shame and the list of things that go flawed – I do not think anyone would start a business. No one of their right mind would try this.”
Correction, June 14, 2024: An earlier version of this text misstated Nvidia’s market cap within the headline.
