This is what hundreds of millions of gamers in the world play on. It’s a GeForce. This is the chip that’s inside. For nearly 30 years, Nvidia’s chips have been coveted by gamers, shaping what’s possible in graphics and dominating the entire market since it first popularized the term Graphics Processing Unit with the GeForce 256. Now, its chips are powering something entirely different.

ChatGPT has started a very intense conversation. He thinks it’s the most revolutionary thing since the iPhone. Venture capital interest in AI startups has skyrocketed. All of us working in this field have been optimistic that at some point the broader world would understand the importance of this technology. And it’s actually really exciting that that’s starting to happen. As the engine behind large language models like ChatGPT, Nvidia is finally reaping rewards for its investment in AI, even as other chip giants suffer in the shadow of U.S.-China trade tensions and an ease in the chip shortage that’s weakened demand.

But the California-based chip designer relies on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to make nearly all its chips, leaving it vulnerable. The biggest risk is really kind of U.S.-China relations and the potential impact to TSMC. That’s, if I’m a shareholder in Nvidia, that’s really the only thing that keeps me up at night.

This isn’t the first time Nvidia has found itself teetering on the leading edge of an uncertain emerging market. It’s neared bankruptcy a handful of times in its history when founder and CEO Jensen Huang bet the company on impossible-seeming ventures. Every company makes mistakes and I make a lot of them. And some of them puts the company in peril. Especially in the beginning, because we were small and we’re up against very, very large companies and we’re trying to invent this brand new technology.

We sat down with Huang at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley headquarters to find out how he pulled off this latest reinvention and got a behind-the-scenes look at all the ways it powers far more than just gaming. Now one of the world’s top ten most valuable companies, Nvidia is one of the rare Silicon Valley giants that, 30 years in, still has its founder at the helm.

60-year-old Jensen Huang, a Fortune Businessperson of The Year and one of Time’s most influential people in 2021, immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan as a kid and studied engineering at Oregon State and Stanford. In the early 90s, Huang met fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem at Denny’s, where they talked about dreams of enabling PCs with 3D graphics, the kind made popular by movies like Jurassic Park at the time.

The friends launched Nvidia out of a condo in Fremont, California, in 1993. The name was inspired by N.V. for next version and Invidia, the Latin word for envy. They hoped to speed up computing so much, everyone would be green with envy. At more than 80% of revenue, its primary business remains GPUs. Typically sold as cards that plug into a PC’s motherboard, they add computing power to central processing units, CPUs, from companies like AMD and Intel.

This is not a chip business. This is a business of figuring out things end to end. But at the start, its future was far from guaranteed. In the beginning, there weren’t that many applications for it, frankly, and we smartly chose one particular combination that was a home run. It was computer graphics and we applied it to video games. Now Nvidia is known for revolutionizing gaming and Hollywood with rapid rendering of visual effects. Nvidia designed its first high performance graphics chip in 1997. Designed, not manufactured, because Huang was committed to making Nvidia a fabless chip company, keeping capital expenditure way down by outsourcing the extraordinary expense of making the chips to TSMC.

In 1999, after laying off the majority of workers and nearly going bankrupt to do it, Nvidia released what it claims was the world’s first official GPU, the GeForce 256. It was the first programmable graphics card that allowed custom shading and lighting effects. By 2000, Nvidia was the exclusive graphics provider for Microsoft’s first Xbox. Microsoft and the Xbox happened at exactly the time that we invented this thing called the programmable shader and it defines how computer graphics is done today.

Nvidia went public in 1999 and its stock stayed largely flat until demand went through the roof during the pandemic. In 2006, it released a software toolkit called CUDA that would eventually propel it to the center of the AI boom. It’s essentially a computing platform and programming model that changes how Nvidia GPUs work, from serial to parallel compute.

Nvidia’s big steps haven’t always been in the right direction. In the early 2010s, it made unsuccessful moves into smartphones with its Tegra line of processors. In 2020, Nvidia closed a long-awaited $7 billion deal to acquire data center chip company Mellanox. Despite some setbacks, today, Nvidia has 26,000 employees, a newly built polygon-themed headquarters in Santa Clara, California, and billions of chips used for far more than just graphics.

More than a decade ago, Nvidia’s CUDA and GPUs were the engine behind AlexNet, what many consider AI’s Big Bang moment. It was a new, incredibly accurate neural network that obliterated the competition during a prominent image recognition contest in 2012. Turns out the same parallel processing needed to create lifelike graphics is also ideal for deep learning, where a computer learns by itself rather than relying on a programmer’s code.

What are some real world applications for Nvidia’s AI? Healthcare is one big area. Think far faster drug discovery and DNA sequencing that takes hours instead of weeks. There’s also art powered by Nvidia AI, like Rafik Anadol’s creations that cover entire buildings. And when crypto started to boom, Nvidia’s GPUs became the coveted tool for mining the digital currency. Gaming cards go out of stock and prices get bid up and then when the crypto mining boom collapses, then there’s a big crash on the gaming side.

Although Nvidia did create a simplified GPU made just for mining, it didn’t stop crypto miners from buying up gaming GPUs, sending prices through the roof. And although that shortage is over, Nvidia caused major sticker shock among some gamers last year by pricing its new 40-series GPUs far higher than the previous generation. Now there’s too much supply and the most recently reported quarterly gaming revenue was down 46% from the year before.

But Nvidia still beat expectations in its most recent earnings report, thanks to the AI boom, as tech giants like Microsoft and Google fill their data centers with thousands of Nvidia A100s, the engines used to train large language models like ChatGPT.

Nvidia’s DGX A100 server board has eight Ampere GPUs that work together to enable things like the insanely fast and uncannily humanlike responses of ChatGPT. More than a decade ago, Nvidia’s CUDA and GPUs were the engine behind AlexNet, what many consider AI’s Big Bang moment. It was a new, incredibly accurate neural network that obliterated the competition during a prominent image recognition contest in 2012.

Here’s where you can add article content…

47 COMMENTS

  14. Chat GPT will make fun of Jesus Christ but if you ask it to make a joke about Muhammad it says it doesn't make racial or religious jokes but it'll absolutely make fun of a black Jesus who's teaching this AI to be racist against white people😮😮😮😮😮😮

  19. ☁️☁️🌷🌷 MIMPI MELIHAT TULISAN CHIP ☁️☁️🌷🌷 DEMIKIAN APA ADANYA SALAM DAMAI PENUH KASIH SAYANG TERSENYUM BAHAGIA ☁️☁️🌷🌷

  21. #all here is the summary of video below for more detail you can check this Rise of Nvidia Video https://youtu.be/slkWF4rTbxk
    – [00:00](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=0s) 🎮 Nvidia's GPUs have been a key player in the gaming industry for nearly 30 years, dominating the graphics processing unit market since the introduction of GeForce 256.

    – [01:01](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=61s) 🌐 Nvidia's investment in AI, especially as the engine behind large language models like ChatGPT, is paying off, despite challenges from U.S.-China relations and chip shortages.

    – [02:27](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=147s) 🧑‍💼 Nvidia's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan, and the company's journey began with a vision of enabling PCs with 3D graphics.

    – [03:29](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=209s) 🖥 While GPUs remain Nvidia's primary business, they have expanded into various fields like data centers, cloud computing, and AI, becoming one of the world's top ten most valuable companies.

    – [06:01](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=361s) 🛡 Nvidia's investment in parallel computing through technologies like CUDA paved the way for their significant role in the AI boom, despite past setbacks in the smartphone market.

    – [07:55](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=475s) 🚀 Nvidia's GPUs played a crucial role in the early success of deep learning, contributing to the AI revolution and the development of large language models like ChatGPT.

    – [10:24](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=624s) 💬 Nvidia's AI chips, such as the A100, are in high demand, especially for large language model training, as tech giants like Microsoft and Google fill their data centers with these chips.

    – [12:50](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=770s) 🌐 Nvidia faces geopolitical risks due to its dependence on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and the U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips.

    – [16:22](https://youtu.be/d3L2uPuxOxU?t=982s) 🕹 Nvidia's innovation extends beyond gaming to areas like ray tracing, simulations, and AI-driven graphics, with the company's "Omniverse" project representing a significant future bet.

  24. I have fond memories of buying early Geforce models to play pc games. That was Half Life and a geforce 2 and Half Life 2 and Doom 3 on a geforce 6xxx.

  25. 00:03 Nvidia's chips have transitioned from gaming to powering AI, specifically ChatGPT.
    02:11 Nvidia's founder, Jensen Huang, continues to lead the company after 30 years.
    04:20 Nvidia revolutionized gaming and Hollywood with rapid rendering of visual effects.
    06:38 Nvidia grew from gaming to AI giant and now powers ChatGPT.
    08:51 Nvidia's AI boom outperforms gaming revenue.
    11:04 Nvidia's technology is export controlled and they comply with regulations to serve their customers in China.
    13:09 TSMC's investment in chip fabrication plants in Arizona is a big deal for the chip industry.
    15:16 Nvidia's growth from gaming to AI giant and its contributions to autonomous driving technology
    17:29 Nvidia's progress into various industries: car, logistics, wind turbines

    You Can't Judge A Video By Its Cover. you can by its first few chapters and certainly by its last.

  26. Let’s call it what it is , Nvidia does nothing for AI that any other GPU can’t do . There’s nothing special about Nvidia except their computer cores . AMD or any other GPU manufacturer can do the same , it’s just that Nvidia are slightly faster than the rest . Get off the hype train .

  32. They still ship a100 and their latest to China. They just rename the product or change the firm after they ship the product. 25% of Billions earned will never fall off the quarterly reports.

  35. I can imagine that the U.S really sweetened the deal for TSMC's factories in AZ. TSMC is in a great position to ask for support in any way it wants considering that the most sensible way to continue the status quo is to have the same company supplying the same companies.

    U.S is looking to the same thing with lithium mining domestically. It's no longer an existential problem for tech companies; its an unmitigated risk to national security.

    And currently there are headlines as Meta and Microsoft signaling partnership with AMD. Microsoft made it's own as well.

    future is going to be wild ladies and gentlemen. Ride the wave or get crushed by it.

  37. More quarters and outlooks from big tech names, powered by Nvidia, as well as this trader FOMO, may lead to renewed buying strength in markets in October. I want to invest more than $300k, but not sure on how to mitigate risk

  39. Short demand for software chips it's because of the competition they do not want you or anybody to think of creating the future an example they shut down fries Who is they you buy Tech to create better Tech yes bad for business I said it once can a man build the future with no money😢

  42. nvidia didnt find themselfes in the right spot and the right time… they were less than 10 people company until microsoft console that was a hardware spyware always connect to the internet with a camera and sensors….. and then they always forced and pushed for graphs development, it was a nsa gov company…… and their interest is very open… ai and other tech…… they build gpus for games and work until the second they could make more money in ai……. now they are a trillionaire valued…. company…. making hardware for ai….. and ai is not hardware is the same as microsoft making keyboards and mouses………. also microsoft, amd, tesla, intel , arm and your mother is making ai chips…. the value is in the software….. ai as sas is the new internet…..

  47. There are more than just one sound processor manufacturer. Software sound simulator could help at affordable cost even Microsoft may not fancy but they had many software drivers with many format in xboxor even wav. And mp3 and MIDI total software driver and THX and Atmos all are software

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here