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 80 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
NVIDIA raised only $20 million in venture funding prior to going public
“NVIDIA was started in 1993, only ever raised twenty million dollars.”
Huang: NVIDIA has 250M to 300M active compatible CUDA GPUs globally
“There are literally a couple of hundred million, right? 250,000,300 million installed base of active CUDA GPUs being used in the world today, and they're all architecturally compatible.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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 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.”
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…”
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.”
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 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.”
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: 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.”
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…”
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?”
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”
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.”