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.
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Huang: CEOs must position companies near future opportunities before they appear
“You want to pave the way to future opportunities. You can't wait until the opportunity is sitting in front of you for you to reach out for it, and so you have to anticipate. You know, our job as CEO is to look around corners and anticipate where will opportuni…”
Huang: NVIDIA was the only consumer 3D graphics company in 1993
“Now remember, at the time that we started the company in 1993,
We were the only consumer, three D graphics company ever created”
Huang: Someday every car will be software-defined
“And I said, I don't think anybody can tolerate that, but it doesn't change the fact that someday every car will be a software defined car.”
Huang: 1997 was probably NVIDIA's best moment despite near bankruptcy
“And that time, 1997, was probably NVIDIA's best moment, and the reason for that was our backs were up against the wall, we were running out of time, we were running out of money, and for a lot of employees, running out of hope.”
Huang: GeForce NOW was NVIDIA's first data center product, preceding CUDA supercomputing
“GeForce Now was NVIDIA's first data center product. And our second data center product was remote graphics, putting our GPUs in, in the world's enterprise data centers, which then led us to our third product, which combined CUDA plus our GPU, which became a su…”
NVIDIA's programmable shaders were the first massively parallel processors
“And if you just looked at the pipeline of a programmable shader, it is a processor and is highly parallel, and it is massively threaded, and it is the only processor in the world that does that.”
Architectural compatibility is NVIDIA's only non-negotiable operating rule
“And so, that's the only unnegotiable rule in our company. Everything else is negotiable.”
Huang personally delivered the first DGX supercomputer to OpenAI
“DGX, the first version that we built was used internally, and I delivered the first one to OpenAI”
Enterprise buyers face zero career risk choosing Nvidia hardware over unproven competitors
“Nobody is getting fired for buying Nvidia anytime soon.”
Nvidia is using artificial intelligence to design its own semiconductor chips
“They're actually using AI to design the chips themselves now.”
Nvidia has an installed base of 500 million CUDA-capable GPUs globally
“Today there are five hundred million CUDA capable GPUs for developers to target.”
Training early large transformer models was financially untenable for anyone except Google
“GPUs and NVIDIA and the transformer made it possible, but to work with the size of models you're talking about spending an amount of money that's certainly for a nonprofit and anybody really except Google was untenable.”
Most AI workloads run adequately on A100s unless training GPT-4 class models
“Most workloads can be run on A-Hundreds unless you're doing model training of GPT-IV.”
Parallel computing on GPUs acts as an Archimedes lever on Moore's Law
“Whatever advances are happening in Moore's law and the number of transistors on a chip, If you have an algorithm that can run in parallel, which is not all problem spaces, but many can, then you can basically lever up Moore's Law by hundreds of times, or thous…”
Nvidia DGX Cloud starting prices are $37,000 monthly for an A100 system
“So starting price for DGX Cloud is 37,000 dollars a month, which will get you an A-one hundred based system, not an H-one hundred based system.”
Nvidia launched the H100 GPU in September 2022 retailing at $40,000
“So they launched it in September, twenty-twenty-two. It's the successor to the A-One hundred. One GPU, one H-One hundred, cost 40,000 dollars.”
Nvidia operates with no designated active succession plan for CEO Jensen Huang
“I don't think there's anyone else there where they're, like, getting ready for that person to take over. I think The company is a extension of Jensen's thoughts and will and drive and belief about the future, and that's kind of what happens.”
Nvidia projected a $1 trillion TAM by capturing 1% of global industry
“In one of Nvidia's earnings slides in 2021. They put up their total addressable market and they said they had a one trillion dollar TAM. And the way that they calculated this was that they were going to serve customers who Provided a hundred trillion dollars w…”
Nvidia's H100 GPU is nine times faster for AI training than A100
“So, the reason you want an H-one hundred is they're 30 times faster than an A-one hundred, which mind you is only like two and a half years older. It is nine times faster for AI training.”
Cloud service providers account for half of Nvidia's data center revenue
“The CFO Colette Kress said on their last earnings call that about half of the revenue from the data center business unit is CSPs. And then I believe after that is the consumer internet companies, and after that is enterprises.”
Nvidia functions fundamentally as a platform company akin to Microsoft
“They do make semiconductors, and they do make data center gear, but really they are a platform company. The right analogy for NVIDIA also is Microsoft. They make the operating system. They make the programming environment. They make many of the applications.”
Generative AI and cloud compute convergence is Nvidia's greatest growth tailwind
“And the combination of those three things turns out to be basically the single greatest moment that could ever happen for NVIDIA.”
Jensen Huang made three existential bets on NVIDIA and won every time
“Jensen bet the company three separate times, and truly bet the company, like, if this initiative fails, it will go to zero, and it worked three separate times.”
Gilbert: 10x computing gains every 5-7 years continue via GPUs
“When you look at, like, what NVIDIA's been doing with GPUs, it is totally fair to say that this 10 X improvement in computing every five, six, seven years, that is absolutely still happening”
Gilbert: NVIDIA and Stanford matched Google Brain's 1,000 nodes with three
“And so, in 2013, Brian Catanzaro, who's a research scientist at NVIDIA, published a paper with some other researchers at Stanford, which included Andrew Ng, where they were able to take this unsupervised learning approach that had been done inside the Google B…”
Gilbert: CUDA was not a useful platform for six-plus years after 2006
“Because while CUDA development began in 2006, That was not a useful usable platform for six plus years at NVIDIA.”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA was first graphics card company to write in-house drivers
“All the other graphics cards companies at the time and most peripheral companies, they let the further downstream partners rate the drivers for what they were doing. NVIDIA was the first one that said, no, no, we want to control this. We want to make sure cons…”
Rosenthal: CUDA software cannot be deployed on non-NVIDIA chips
“You do any of this work, you cannot deploy it on anything but NVIDIA chips.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA's 66% gross margins prove their durable moat
“They now have a 66% gross margin, so that illustrates to me how seriously differentiated they are and how much of a moat they have versus competitors in order to price with that kind of margin.”
Rosenthal: AlexNet on CUDA was the 'big bang' moment for AI
“We cannot overstate the importance of this moment, not just for NVIDIA, but for, like, computer science, for technology, for business, for the world, for us staring at the screens of our phones all day every day. This was the big bang moment for artificial int…”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA barred consumer GeForce cards from data centers in 2018
“In 2018 they actually do change the terms of the user agreements of their consumer cards, of GeForce cards, that you cannot put them in data centers anymore.”
Andreessen: Every deep learning startup in 2016 built on Nvidia
“Marc Andreessen gave an interview. He said, we've been investing in a lot of companies applying deep learning to many areas, and every single one effectively comes in building on NVIDIA's platforms. It's like when people were all building on Windows in the nin…”
Gilbert: NVIDIA generates a 37% operating margin, beating Apple
“Another one that I wanted to point out, it's a freaking hardware company, I know we didn't, they're not a hardware company, but they're a hardware company, with 37% operating margins, so this is even better than Apple”
Gilbert: NVIDIA's investment in CUDA was an iPhone-sized bet
“Those were big bets relative to the company's size at the time, but this bet is like an iPhone-sized bet.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA Artificially Restricted Consumer GPU Crypto Mining
“What they did was they artificially crippled the card to make it worse at crypto mining.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia laid off 70% of staff, shrinking to 35 employees
“They have to lay off 70% of the company, which they do. They go down to about 35 people.”
Gilbert: Nvidia's Graphics Head Start Made It the Best Machine Learning Hardware Company
“Imagine if you started a business in the early nineties doing a thing that seemed like a small market at the time, but you did the thing, and then it turns out that that gave you line of sight to something That the same technology was uniquely able to do That …”
Gilbert: Nvidia grows in 6-to-10-year epochs driven by contrarian bets
“Throughout the company's history, they basically have these, like, six to 10 year epochs, and during those, they have, like,
A meteoric rise when they do something contrarian that's off the rest of the industry, and then it starts to taper, and they need to fi…”
Gilbert: Jensen Huang remains an underrated CEO despite Nvidia's huge hype
“And as hyped as Nvidia has been, you know, over the last five years, obviously with the stock run up and everyone's excitement around the company, I think Jensen is still an underrated CEO, even rated. Where the Nvidia bulls have put him.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia's 1999 GeForce 256 offered 5x better graphics performance than competitors
“And it's because this card that they ship, the first GeForce in 1999, it's the GeForce two 56. It's so powerful. It has five X better graphics performance than like anything else on the market.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia Raised a $2M Seed Round at a $6M Valuation
“Two million dollar total round. I don't know who invested what. I assume a million each, but two million dollar total round at a six million dollar post money valuation.”
Rosenthal: Early Sequoia Nvidia investment is one of the best venture returns ever
“I think a lot of the GPs at Sequoia and certainly Mark Stevens, who was one of my professors at GSB. Who was on the board for Sequoia is still on the board have held their shares personally for like to this day. Like that's one of the best venture investment r…”
Gilbert: Jensen Huang bet Nvidia three separate times, nearing bankruptcy each time
“The co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang really has bet the company, like the whole company, three separate times, nearly going bankrupt each time.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia Was the First Dedicated Graphics Card Company
“NVIDIA is the first. They are the first dedicated graphics card company.”
Nvidia Signed $500M/Year Xbox GPU Deal with Microsoft
“Five hundred million dollar a year deal for Nvidia to supply the graphics for the Xbox with a two hundred million dollar advance.”
Bathgate: Cadence is taking digital EDA market share from Synopsys
“We do think they're taking market share, especially in digital markets, like where they would be selling to an Intel or an Apple or an Nvidia. We think they're the share gainer, but both companies, it's like an extremely high quality duopoly.”
Bathgate: Nvidia has one of the world's best business models
“NVIDIA has got close to 70% gross margins and like, you know, low forties operating margins. I did really with very little cyclicality because TSMC offloaded all that cyclicality. Right. So it is just like one of the best business models besides I would say en…”
AlexNet Was Trained on Two Off-the-Shelf Nvidia GTX 580 GPUs
“They buy two NVIDIA GeForce GTX five eighties, which were NVIDIA's top of the line gaming cards at the time. The Toronto team rewrites their neural network algorithms in CUDA, NVIDIA's programming language. They train it on these two off the shelf GTX five eig…”