The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 145 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Huang says he wouldn't have started NVIDIA if he knew the suffering
“The reason why I wouldn't do it, and it goes back to why it's so hard, is building a company and building a video turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, any of us expected it to be. And at that time, if we realized the pain an…”
Google TPUs Are Only Scaled AI Chip Deployment Besides Nvidia
“They're a chip company with their Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which is the only real scale deployment of AI chips in the world besides Nvidia GPUs.”
Chang: TSMC Offered NVIDIA Over $100M with 48-Hour Deadline
“Yes. More than a hundred million. And I also said, our offer is effective, 48 hours. If you do not, there is not going to be, we are not going to argue, we are not going to bargain. If you don't accept the offer within 48 hours, we will have to go to an arbitr…”
Chang: Previous TSMC CEO Offered NVIDIA Zero Dollars in Dispute
“The previous CEO did not even give him a number, you know. The previous CEO gave him zero.”
Huang: Company org charts should mirror the architecture of their products
“Your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product. Right. That's what a company is.”
Huang: NVIDIA's RIVA 128 chip design methodology became the industry standard
“The number of smart decisions we made, which are smart to this day, how we design chips is exactly the same to this day. Because, gosh, you know, nobody's ever done it back then, and we pulled every trick in the book in a desperation because we had no other ch…”
Huang says traditional managers rely on information asymmetry, unlike at NVIDIA
“In a command and control system, the person who you reports to has more power than you. And the reason why they have more power than you is because they're closer to the source of information than you are. In our company, the information is disseminated fairly…”
Huang: NVIDIA is only accelerator maker with universal architectural compatibility
“We are the only accelerator on the planet where every single accelerator is architecturally compatible with the others. None has ever existed.”
Huang: Founders can do everything right and fail, or make mistakes and succeed
“You could do all the right smart things and still fail. You could do a whole bunch of dumb things, and I did many of them, and still succeed.”
Competitive moats erode and margins compress as total addressable markets become massive
“Every moat only works if the castle is sufficiently small. If the prize at the end of the finish line becomes sufficiently large, you're gonna need a bigger moat, and you need to figure out a you know, how to defend the castle harder.”
Nvidia's gross margins will not erode significantly below 65% as shortages subside
“That's gonna go away, but I don't think this very high, you know, 65% plus margin is gonna erode too much.”
Nvidia's Q2 FY24 release was one of history's greatest corporate earnings reports
“I think this was one of, if not the most incredible earnings release by any scaled public company ever. Seriously, no matter what happens going forward, last week was a historic moment.”
The AI market faces an investor crisis of confidence within 18 months
“I think there's a pretty reasonable chance that there's some falter in the next 12 to 18 months where there's a crisis of confidence among investors where at some point something will come out Where we all observe, oh, maybe GPTs aren't as useful as we thought…”
Any challenger unseating Nvidia's AI dominance requires an unforeseen flank attack
“So I think the bottom line here is it nearly impossible to compete with them head on, and if anybody's gonna unseat NVIDIA in the future of AI and accelerated computing, it's either gonna be from some unknown flank attack that they don't see, or the future wil…”
Nvidia's $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox is one of tech's best ever
“They made one of the best acquisitions of all time back in 2020, and nobody had any idea. They bought a quirky little networking company out of Israel called Mellanox.”
Nvidia is the only viable platform for training GPT-class frontier AI models
“If you want to train GPT or a GPT class model, there's one option. You're doing it on NVIDIA. There's one option.”
Rosenthal: Replicating NVIDIA's 15-year CUDA stack is an enormous challenge
“This is 15 years of CUDA and the hardware underneath it and the libraries on top of it that Nvidia has built. To go recreate that and surpass it on your own is such an enormous, enormous bite to bite.”
Google Operates an Estimated 2 to 3 Million Custom TPUs
“But today, Google, it's estimated, has two to three million TPUs. For reference, Nvidia shipped, people don't know for sure, somewhere around four million GPUs last year.”
Rosenthal: Great companies retain homegrown or long-tenured senior executives
“This is almost always true, really is true in every great company that I can think of. The core senior most executive team are all people who came up in the company Or have been there for a very, very long time. It's not a whole bunch of mercenaries there at t…”
Huang: Nobody would start NVIDIA knowing 32 years of hardship beforehand
“The mountain of it in the course of 31 years, if I were to take all of that all the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years, and I would have compressed it into the brain of a twenty-nine-year-old, there is no way th…”
Huang: I would start NVIDIA again knowing how it turned out
“Of course, I, it was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that, and of course I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way.”
Huang: Separating compute location from display explodes hardware market opportunity
“The disconnection between where NVIDIA's computing is done versus where it's enjoyed, If you can separate that, your market opportunity explodes.”
Huang: Quake and Unreal were the first two killer consumer 3D apps
“If he hadn't decided to go to OpenGL and accelerate, accelerate for Quake frankly, you know, what would be the killer app that put us here? And so Carmack and Sweeney, both between Unreal and Quake, created the first two killer applications for consumer three …”
Huang: Markets where technology is never good enough offer sustainable opportunity
“And for certain segments of the market where the technology is never good enough, like three D graphics, when we chose the right technology, three D graphics is never good enough. And we call it back then, three D gives us sustainable technology opportunity be…”
Huang: Enabling an ecosystem in an early market builds a network moat
“Oftentimes, if you created the market, you ended up having, you know, what people describe as moats. Because if you build your product right, and it's enabled an entire ecosystem around you, To help serve that end market, you've essentially created a platform.…”
Huang: Betting the farm requires prefetching and simulating all future risk
“And so when you push your chips in, what you're really doing is you're, when you bet the farm, you're saying, I'm going to take everything in the future, all the risky things, and I'm going to pull it in advance. And that is probably the lesson. And to this da…”
Huang: Distributed networking and infrastructure define data centers, not chips
“A data center is distinguished from a desktop computer versus a cell phone, not by the processor in it. A desktop computer in a data center uses the same CPUs, uses the same GPUs, apparently, right? Very close. And so it's not the chip, it's not the processing…”
Nvidia bifurcated its architecture to monopolize TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity
“And by NVIDIA bifurcating their chip architectures into a gaming segment that does not have this latest COWAS technology, this allows them to monopolize, like, a huge amount of TSMC's capacity to make the COWAS chips, specifically for these H-one hundreds, whi…”
DGX Cloud rental pricing yields a three-month capex payback on A100 hardware
“A listener helped us out and estimated that the cost to actually build an equivalent A-one hundred DGX system Would be today something like a 120 K. Remember, this is the previous generation. This is not H-one hundreds. And you can rent it for 37 K a month. So…”
AMD lacks Nvidia's TSMC advanced packaging capacity and CUDA developer ecosystem
“AMD doesn't have all this capacity reserved from TSMC, at least not for the 2.5 D packaging process for the high end GPUs. AMD doesn't have the developer ecosystem from CUDA.”
Nvidia will eventually operate its own complete data center buildings
“They used to have to plug into other people's servers, and then they started making servers that plugged into other people's racks and rows and architectures, and then they started making their own entire rows and walls, and at some point here, they're gonna s…”
Qualcomm's Market Entry Strategically Rivals or Surpasses Nvidia's
“The business history of Qualcomm, just like Bill Gurley said on the blurb of this book, It is one of the most brilliant strategic executions of entering a market period. You know, like, writ large ever. Like, this is on par with NVIDIA, if not, honestly, more …”
In 2022, Qualcomm Outranked Nvidia as the Largest Fabless Semiconductor Company
“Qualcomm today is the largest fabulous semiconductor company in the world... Bigger than NVIDIA.”
Gilbert: Enterprises will model everything in Omniverse before real-world rollout
“Because I think now that we have the compute, the ability to gather the data, and the ability to actually, you know, run these simulations in a way that has a efficient way of running it and a good user interface to understand the data, people are going to sto…”
NVIDIA and CUDA constitute a platform on par with Apple and Microsoft
“NVIDIA is a platform, in my mind, no doubt about it. CUDA and NVIDIA and general purpose computing on GPUs is a platform, so whatever, you know, all of the stew of powers that go into making that, that go into making Apple, Microsoft, you know, and the like, G…”
Gilbert: Nvidia needs physical AI to sustain its historical growth
“The A plus is definitely that it does exist in the physical world, and they are the dominant provider of everything you need to be able to accomplish that. And if the real world stuff, you know, these little robots that run around factory floors, and the auton…”
Rosenthal: Google and Meta depend fundamentally on Nvidia
“This is Google and Facebook and a whole list of other companies on the consumer side, and they're all dependent on NVIDIA.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA Will Likely Shift Away From Board Partners to Direct Sales
“So I suspect that shifts more over time. I can't imagine a company that wants as much control as NVIDIA does loves the ad and board partner thing, but they've built a business on it, and so they're not really willing to cannibalize and alienate. But I bet if t…”
Gilbert: Unbundling software from hardware creates strategic conflict without segmentation
“Oftentimes when someone has hardware that is differentiated by software and services, and then they decide to start selling those software and services a la carte, it's a strategy conflict. It's your classic vertical versus horizontal problem, unless you are g…”
Rosenthal: Jensen Huang did not anticipate AlexNet's breakthrough
“Jensen did not plan Alex net or see it coming cause nobody saw Alex net coming.”
Rosenthal: 89 Other Graphics Chip Startups Were Funded Soon After Nvidia
“Literally 89 other companies get funded within a couple months to go do the same thing.”
Only Nvidia and ATI Survived the 90s Graphics Startup Boom
“When all the VCs funded these 90, you know, Silicon Valley startups to go make graphics cards, three D graphics cards, the only two surviving ones were Nvidia, which went through this hellish journey, and then these Canadian guys that were, like, totally out o…”
Gilbert: AMD's acquisition of Nvidia failed over Huang's CEO demand
“AMD tried to buy Nvidia to make that their graphics line, and it was possible because it's not like the stock was blowing up at this point in time, and it had this sort of few years of reasonable stagnation before we get into late 2006, 2007, and certainly peo…”
Larry Page Personally Approved $130M Nvidia GPU Order in 2014
“So they settle on a plan to order 40,000 GPUs. From Nvidia. For a cost of a hundred and thirty million dollars. That's a big enough price tag that the request gets elevated to Larry Page, who personally approves it, even though finance wanted to kill it, becau…”
Nvidia Charges 75% to 80% Gross Margins on AI Chips
“Everyone is paying NVIDIA 75, 80% gross margins, implying something like a four or five X markup on what it costs to make the chips.”
Chang: NVIDIA became a top-five TSMC customer within three years
“Within two or three years, they were, they did become one of the biggest five customers.”