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 61 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.”
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.”
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'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 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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”