At present, human beings stand at the crossroads of the era of artificial intelligence. If artificial intelligence is a gold rush, then Nvidia (NVDA.).US) is one of the heavyweight shovel sellers.
Since last year, Nvidia has been riding the wind of the artificial intelligence track, and its stock price has been climbing like a green pine breaking through the ground. As of the beginning of 2023, NVIDIA's stock price is like an arrow from the string, with a cumulative increase of 438%, and the total market value is approaching the $2 trillion mark. This magnificent sight allowed Nvidia to surpass Amazon (AMZN.) in one fell swoopUS) and Google (GOOGUS) parent company Alphabet, becoming the second largest parent company after Microsoft (MSFTUS) and Apple (AAPL.).US) is the third largest company in terms of value in the United States.
Nvidia's ability to "print money" is also quite explosive, and the recently released performance report shows that Nvidia will achieve revenue of 221 in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 20240.3 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 26528%；Net profit 122$8.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 76881%, revenue and net profit significantly exceeded market expectations.
Nvidia is shining with gold, and we have to mention the founder behind it, Jensen Huang.
Jensen Huang, a legendary technology leader, has taken on the mission of bringing LinkedIn to the technology giant ship with his extraordinary talent and vision. Under his helm, NVIDIA has gone through ups and downs, repeatedly turned danger into relief, and finally forged today's glory.
Huang was born in 1963 in Tainan, Taiwan, China, to a chemical engineer father and a teacher mother.
Huang's childhood was spent in troubled times, which also taught him to be strong and adaptable, which was important for the founding and development of NVIDIA.
When Huang was just 5 years old, he moved with his parents to Thailand in search of a new life, but the country's political turmoil at the time did not provide him with a healthy environment to grow up in. So, when Huang was 9 years old, his parents decided to send him and his brother to the United States to join his uncle. However, fate has landed them in a boarding school that is like an island. There, Huang was bullied and traumatized, and began to rebel, learning to smoke, fight, and drink heavily, like a lost lamb to become one of the troubled students.
But in later interviews, he said that the experience did not actually make him learn badly, but learned to adapt to the environment. Huang also introduced himself like this"You can describe me in many words, but the first one is resilience. ”
Two years later,Huang was transferred to a formal school and began his formal education, and during that time, he began his career as a top student and his life was officially on the right track.
At that time, his passion for mathematics and engineering was like a fiery sun, and he did not hesitate to devote himself to the electrical engineering major of the university, which was full of blueprints for building the future world, and made designing chips and computers as a daily basis.
After graduating from Stanford University with a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1990, Huang spent his career as an explorer in the field of chips, honing and enriching his skills as a chip engineer at two industry monuments, AMD and LSI Logic, laying a solid foundation for the future of NVIDIA's technology giant.
In 1993, Huang set an ambitious goal in his life, determined to build an empire of graphics chips.
In the same year, inspired by the development of computer games, he co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky (now a senior technology officer at NVIDIA) and Curtis Priem (retired in 2003), aiming at the potential of the gaming graphics market. Jensen Huang, who has been CEO since the beginning, tattooed the Nvidia logo on his upper left arm, as if it were his badge of faith.
However, the road to entrepreneurship is not an easy one, and Nvidia has also encountered storms in the choppy business sea. Product sales plummeted, cash flow was tight, talent was scarce and other problems followed, making Nvidia face huge challenges. However, after a series of reforms and financing measures, NVIDIA has been reborn like a phoenix in flames, step by step to find the beat of the times, and embark on a successful journey.
According to public information, NVIDIA's development process can be divided into 4 stages:
From 1993 to 1997, it was a dormant period, and the chip products NV1 and NV2 were launched, but because they were too maverick and not suitable for mainstream products in the market, they did not gain the market;
From 1998 to 2006, it was a period of rise, and it has maintained a strong position in the field where the market is still blank with GPU. Among them, the company was listed on NASDAQ in 1999;
From 2006 to 2016, it was a period of expansion, with CUDA (i.e., Unified Computing Architecture), the application of GPU from games to other fields;
Since 2016, it has been a new outbreak stage, and various fields that require computing power, such as AI, autonomous driving, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining, have found NVIDIA.
When it comes to the early days of entrepreneurship, Huang always feels nervous. He said bluntlyWhen Nvidia was first founded, it almost went out of business。"I was very successful before I founded NVIDIA. "But at Nvidia, I had a real failure, and that failure was both humiliating and embarrassing." There were many times when we almost died. ”
So, the success of earth-shaking or radical change, how can there ever be "pouring wealth and wealth"? They are all obtained after a lot of hardships and deaths. However, once you reach the pinnacle of success, honors, applause and flowers flood into the winners.
Today, NVIDIA has grown into a full-stack computing company, becoming the king of computing power across multiple tracks such as data centers, gaming graphics cards, professional visualization, and autonomous driving.
The data shows thatNvidia has almost monopolized the AI chip market with a market share of 80%.
Guosheng's ** research report shows that in the data center track, Nvidia's shipments in the AI chip market in 2023 will account for about 60-70%; In the gaming graphics card track, Nvidia accounts for more than 80% of the shipments of consumer-grade discrete graphics cards.
"In AI, our research is transforming $100 trillion worth of industries, including gaming, healthcare, and transportation, and is having a profound impact on society," Nvidia said on its website. ”
The success in the field of AI chips has also made NVIDIA earn a lot of money. In fiscal year 2024 (year ended January 28, 2024), Nvidia's revenue was 609US$2.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 126%; Net profit was 297US$600 million, a year-on-year increase of 581%.
O'Laulin, founder of research firm Fabricated Knowledge, notedThe reason why Nvidia can dominate the AI chip manufacturing industry is because it provides the best chips, the best network equipment, and the best software. "It is precisely because Nvidia's layout is early enough and the ecological construction time is long enough that other chips will face the hidden cost of software migration if they want to eat this big cake, which is not an easy task. Olaulin said.
For his outstanding contributions, Huang was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Engineering and was named a 2023 Global AI Leader by Time magazine. Jim Kramer, a well-known stock commentator in the United States, recently praised him, believing that Huang Jenxun is the greatest CEO of all time, surpassing Elon Musk. Jim Kramer also saidHuang was more visionary than Musk, creating the Industrial Revolution.
In terms of wealth, in the 2023 Forbes list of America's richest people,Huang is ranked 17th with a fortune of $40.7 billion. According to the Forbes real-time rich list,Huang's net worth jumped $9.6 billion on Thursday to $69.4 billion. This change will make his wealth surpass that of China's richest man, Nongfu Spring (09633.).HK) founder, Chung Tsui.
As one of the business leaders at the forefront of the global AI track, Huang has his own views on the development of artificial intelligence.
As early as around 2000, Intel (INTCUS) and AMD were busy with the main frequency war, Huang boldly predicted:In the future, microprocessors will be used in other fields such as AI.
Nowadays, with the boom of emerging technologies such as generative AI, metaverse, blockchain, and cloud services, and the surge in global demand for AI chips, AI chips, as the underlying architecture of these technologies, have shown strong growth potential. In this context, NVIDIA's market position and commercial value may become more prominent.
Huang is optimistic about the future of generative AI, saying that "generative AI has now 'reached a tipping point,' with surging demand from companies, industries and countries around the world." He predictedData center infrastructure will double in size in five years, representing a market opportunity of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
"Digital biology and generative AI are helping humans reinvent medicines, advance surgery, medical imaging, and wearables," Huang said. "Gone are the days when everyone needed to learn computers, and bioengineering is probably the dominant discipline of the future. He said.
Huang expressed his views on a country's AI development, saying, "Every country needs to have its own AI infrastructure in order to harness its economic potential while preserving its culture." ”
In addition, Huang has said that, like all generations that have embraced technology in the past, "every company and you must learn the benefits of AI and do incredible things under the common guidance of AI," adding that we are now at the beginning of a major era in which every aspect of computing is being reinvented by AI.
He predicted that if artificial intelligence (AGI) is defined as a computer or software that is "quite competitive" to human intelligence in testing, then "within the next five years, AI will be able to complete these tests." The implication is that AI could surpass human intelligence within 5 years.
Author: Far away.