From Bankruptcy to a Trillion-Dollar Empire: The Unbelievable Rise of Jensen Huang and Nvidia
Bankruptcy to 5 Trillion
Jensen Huang founds Nvidia in 1993, but almost declares bankruptcy in 1996, laying off 50% of the staff and telling his team, "we are 30 days from going out of business."
In 1997, Nvidia wins a contract with Sega but Jensen admits their chip won't work. Sega decides to invest $5M into Nvidia, buying them six months of runway to pivot to a new GPU architecture.
The pivot works. By 1999, Nvidia goes public and releases the GeForce 256, which they market as the world's first "GPU", and they dominate the PC gaming market.
The students were hacking his gaming cards to solve complex math problems. He realized that the GPU was really a supercomputer masquerading as a toy, and he started aggressively investing in this use case.
Throughout the 2000s, Nvidia would plough profits back into developing CUDA, a software platform that made GPUs programmable for artificial intelligence, scientific computing, and many of the heaviest workloads CPUs can't manage.
Then, in 2016, Jensen hand-delivers the world's 1st AI supercomputer-the DGX-1-to Elon Musk for a nonprofit he's funding called OpenAI, so they can train a "generative model."
But in 2022, Nvidia's stock falls 66% as the PC market slows, and Ethereum switches to Proof-of-Stake, instantly killing the multi-billion-dollar GPU mining market, one of Nvidia's biggest demand drivers. Resale prices for GPUs collapse. Nvidia's revenue guidance drops.
As the industry slows down, Jensen aggressively secures TSMC's limited CoWoS packaging capacity-the bottleneck for AI chips-and bets the farm that the "AI Moment" is going to happen.
In Nov 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Suddenly, every major tech company needs thousands of Nvidia H100s at $30K each.
Tech companies commit 100s of billions from 2023 - 2025 on AI infrastructure spend. Roads lead to Nvidia, and their software layer CUDA is locking developers into their ecosystem.
Today, Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world, valued at 4.3 trillion dollars, and Jensen owns about 3.5% worth $150+ billion.
0 Comments