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
TSMC manufactures all NVIDIA chips and every iPhone and Mac processor
“They make the primary chip inside every MacBook and iPhone shipped today. They're powering the AI wave, manufacturing all of NVIDIA's chips.”
Huang: CUDA is used across almost all fields of scientific research
“CUDA is used for almost all fields of science. Everything from molecular dynamics to imaging, CT reconstruction to seismic processing to, you know, weather simulations, quantum chemistry, the list goes on, right?”
Jensen Huang: NVIDIA is his final job unless he is fired
“Until, until I'm fired, This is my last job.”
Huang: Leaders should take inspiration from business books without adopting them
“Enjoy it, be inspired by it, but not to adopt it. That's not the whole point of these books. The whole point of these books is to share their experiences, and you, you're supposed to ask, you know, what does it mean to me in my world, and what does it mean to …”
NVIDIA partnered with Getty and Shutterstock instead of scraping data
“Instead of scraping the internet we partnered with Getty and Shutterstock to create commercially fair way of applying artificial intelligence sharing to the AI.”
AlexNet was trained on two consumer Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 GPUs
“And what these guys from Toronto did is they went out probably to their local Best Buy or equivalent in Canada. They bought two GeForce GTX-Five-Eighty's, which were the top-of-the-line cards at the time, and they wrote their algorithm, their convolutional neu…”
Microsoft is the exclusive cloud infrastructure provider for OpenAI
“Microsoft is the exclusive cloud infrastructure provider for OpenAI, which runs, as far as we know, solely on NVIDIA infrastructure, but they buy it all through Microsoft.”
Nvidia spent five years building platforms to replace Intel's x86 data centers
“NVIDIA has literally just spent the past five years working insanely hard to build a new computing platform for The data center, a GPU accelerated computing platform to, in their minds, replace the old CPU led Intel dominated x-eighty six architecture in the d…”
Nvidia's CUDA platform reached four million registered developers by May 2023
“If you look at the number of CUDA developers over time, it was released in 2006, It took four years to get the first 100,000 people. Then by twenty-sixteen, 13 years in, they got to a million developers. Then just two years later, they got to two million. So 1…”
Microsoft employs five times more people per market-cap dollar than Nvidia
“They have 26,000 employees, and that sounds like a big number, but for comparison, Microsoft, whose market cap is only twice as big, has 220,000. So that is five X the number of employees per dollar of market cap going on over at Microsoft”
Nvidia bypassed the von Neumann bottleneck via massive hardware parallelism
“So the magical unlock, of course, is to make a computer that is not a von Neumann architecture. To make programs executable in parallel and massively increase the number of processors or cores. And that is exactly what NVIDIA did on the hardware side, and all …”
Data center GPUs represent a $30 billion market growing to $50 billion
“Right now, GPUs In the data center are like a thirty billion dollar a year market going to like a fifty billion dollar next year”
Sales to mainland China accounted for 25% of Nvidia's 2022 total revenue
“Last year, China was 25%, or sales to mainland China, was 25% of NVIDIA's revenue.”
Google built TPUs to offset compute costs while still buying Nvidia hardware
“Even Google at this point in time, this is when they start building their own chips, TPUs, because, you know, they're still buying tons of hardware from NVIDIA, but they're also starting to source their own here.”
Nvidia achieved 70% gross margins in Q2 FY2024 and forecasted 72%
“This last quarter, they had a gross margin of 70%, and they forecasted for next quarter to have a gross margin of 72%.”
Cloud instances cost $30 hourly for A100s and $100 hourly for H100s
“You can get access to a DGX server. That's eight A 100 for about 30 bucks an hour, or you can go over to AWS and get a P five dot 48 X large instance, which is eight H 100, which I believe is an HGX server for about a hundred dollars an hour.”
Nvidia generates $46 million in market capitalization for every single employee
“They have forty six million dollars of market cap per employee.”
Nvidia accelerated to a six-month product release cycle following the COVID-19 pandemic
“Since COVID, NVIDIA has re-accelerated to a six month shipping cycle. They've been doing two GTCs a year, most years since COVID, which is insane for the level of technology complexity that they're doing.”
Nvidia released the Megatron transformer model shortly after acquiring Mellanox in 2019
“In March of 2019, NVIDIA announced they were acquiring Mellanox for seven billion dollars in cash... In August of 2019, NVIDIA released what was at the time the largest transformer-based language model called Megatron. Eight point Three billion parameters trai…”
Nvidia sells DGX artificial intelligence server systems for $150,000 to $300,000
“NVIDIA sells these DGX systems for like, a 150 to 300,000 dollars a box.”
Nvidia split consumer and data center GPU architectures in September 2022
“Up until NVIDIA's current GPU generation, the hopper generation of GPUs for the data center, there was only one GPU architecture at NVIDIA, and that same architecture and those same chips from the same wafers made at TSMC, some of them went to consumer gaming …”
Rosenthal: 70 to 80 early PC graphics card companies received VC funding
“It was 70 or 80 separate companies making graphics cards all got funded”
Gilbert: NVIDIA spends only $1 billion annually on CapEx
“Nvidia only has a billion dollars of capex per year.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA trades at 3x Apple's P/S and 2x Microsoft's
“Nvidia has literally three times the price to sales ratio of Apple, or price to revenue as Apple, and nearly two x Microsoft.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia stock was under $5 per share across 2012-2015
“So literally NVIDIA stock in 20, like recent, like this is now known, 2012, 1314, 15. It doesn't trade above like five bucks a share. And NVIDIA today, as we record this, is I think about two 20 a share. The high in the past year has been well over 300.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA data center revenue tripled to over $10.5B annually
“So then insanely over the last two years, it three X the data center, the segment three X it is now doing over 10 and a half billion a year in revenue. And it's basically the same size as the gaming segment.”
Ben Gilbert: NVIDIA's Scale Moat Relies on Amortizing 1,000+ CUDA Engineers Across Millions
“The whole CUDA investment. Not at first, but definitely now is predicated on being able to amortize that a thousand plus employees spend over the base of the three million developers and all the people who are buying the hardware to use what those developers c…”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA has never charged a dollar for CUDA
“NVIDIA to this day, now this may be changing, we'll talk about this at the end of the episode, has never charged a dollar for CUDA”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA market cap dropped 80% from $20B high in 2008
“So, you know, we said the high was around a twenty billion dollar market cap.
It drops 80%.
Eight zero.”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA Tegra powered the original Tesla Model S infotainment
“It powered the original Tesla Model S touchscreen. So, like, before any of the autopilot autonomous driving stuff, they were the processor powering just the infotainment, the touchscreen infotainment in the Model S.”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA Tegra powers the Nintendo Switch
“The Tegra platform still to this day is the main processor of the Nintendo Switch.”
NVIDIA Took Until 2016 to Reclaim 2007's $20B Market Cap
“It's not until 2016 that Nvidia gets back to the twenty billion dollar market cap peak that they were in 2007 when they were just a gaming company.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA Grew Revenue 60% in Previous Fiscal Year
“They're growing at 60% a year. This is a thirty-year-old company that grew 60% in revenue last year.”
Rosenthal: 2018 Crypto Mining Bust Caused NVIDIA Revenue to Decline
“And then when the crypto winter hit in 2018 and the end of the ICO craze and all that, the mining rig demand It fell off and this had become so big for Nvidia that their revenue actually declined.”
Gilbert: NVIDIA has 1,100 employees with 'CUDA' in their LinkedIn title
“I searched LinkedIn for people who work at NVIDIA today and have the word CUDA in their title. There are 1100 employees dedicated specifically to the CUDA platform.”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA Hopper will be TSMC's first 4nm chip
“I think Hopper is going to be the world's first four nanometer process chip using TSMC's new four nanometer.”
Nvidia's gross margin expanded from 29% in 2004 to 66% in 2022
“They sell their GPUs at a 66% gross margin. Hardware business with a 66% gross margin. Back in 2004, that gross margin was only 29% that they were able to command as a premium on their cards.”
Gilbert: Nvidia was the fastest semiconductor company to reach $1B revenue
“Which makes them the fastest semiconductor ever to reach a billion in revenue and gets them added to the S&P 500.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia sold 1 million Riva 128 units within four months
“They sell one million units of the Riva one 28 within four months.”
Nvidia IPO'd at a $600M Valuation in 1999
“They go public in beginning in 1999 at a six hundred million dollar market cap. So a hundred X return from the six million dollar post money valuation on the Sequoia and Sutter Hill round”
Rosenthal: Nvidia spent $1M on emulation hardware during its cash crunch
“They had to spend a million dollars just to get the emulator, you know, hardware and software to do this.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia doubled hardware performance every six months starting in 1997
“NVIDIA is now on a cycle starting in 1997, 1998. Where they are doubling the performance that they are delivering at a given price point to the market every six months.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia and TSMC signed a multi-year foundry partnership that remains today
“The next year, the two companies sign a huge multi-year deal for TSMC to become the primary foundry for NVIDIA and still are today.”
Rosenthal: Nvidia raised about $20M in total venture capital before going public
“They did raise some more money in between that initial two million and going public. I think they raised twenty million in total, but like there wasn't a lot of window and I think it was Sequoia and Sutter Hill that put that capital in for the rest of that twe…”
Gilbert: Nvidia commands 83% market share in standalone desktop/laptop GPUs
“When Nvidia began in 1993, it made computer graphics chips in a brutally competitive and low-margin market. There were 90 undifferentiated competitors all doing basically the same thing at the same time, and yet today, they have an 83% market share of standalo…”
Rosenthal: Nvidia secured early contract powering Sega arcade and console graphics
“They land a big deal with Sega to power their arcade consoles and their next generation home console to be the three D graphics engine and would ultimately become the Sega Saturn.”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA reached nearly a $20 billion market cap by mid-2007
“They go from sub a billion dollar market cap company after the tech crash up to five to six billion dollars kind of by 2004, 2005. Stock keeps going on a tear. By mid 2007, the stock reaches just under twenty billion dollar market cap.”