To prevent getting lost, the elevator goes directly to the safety islandNewspaper man Liu YaEast A
Zhenghe Island（id：zhenghedao）
Author:Stars
A tough start to 2024.
But Nvidia's momentum is strong, following last year's wild profit of $58.8 billion (converted to about 422.6 billion yuan), in January this year, Nvidia's stock price hit a new high, and its market value soared by nearly $300 billion.
China has always been one of NVIDIA's important markets, accounting for 1 4 of the world's total sales. It's just that the U.S. export controls have frustrated Nvidia, and the "castrated version" of chips has been cold in China.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang once described the current situation as "tying our hands behind our backs."
Some time ago, Huang Jenxun came to China in a low-key manner, which is his second visit to Chinese mainland after four years.
Different from the deserted atmosphere of the annual meeting in China, the annual meeting of Nvidia China was very lively, and Huang Jenxun wore a Northeast vest and twisted Yangge's ** explosion all over the Internet.
It is said that the arrogant Huang Jenxun dragged his suitcase and found a golden red envelope for the employee in the form of **, and it was quite a coincidence that the name of the employee who won the lottery was "Huawei".
Today's chip war is not only limited to the commercial field, but also a game of the future global pattern between major powers.
As the man at the helm of Nvidia, Huang went from being a "gangster" to being on the Forbes rich list with a net worth of $29.8 billion, and his entrepreneurial story is quite legendary.
How did Huang lead LinkedIn to the top? Understanding chips, Huang and Nvidia would be a good entry point.
The "most belligerent" Chinese in Silicon Valley
Huang Jenxun, who is worth tens of billions, almost became a "problem teenager".
Huang was born in 1963 in Taiwan, China, and his ancestral home is Lishui, Zhejiang.
My father is a chemical engineer and my mother is a teacher, this is a typical Chinese family, and it is the long-cherished wish of my parents to "hope that my son will become a dragon".
In order to give him a better education, at the age of nine, his parents sent Huang and his older brother to his uncle's house in the United States.
My uncle's family was in financial difficulties, so they were sent to a rural boarding school, which was said to be a boarding school, but in fact it was more like a concentration camp for troubled teenagers, with some carrying knives and some with tattoos all over their bodies.
Because of his young age, Huang was often bullied and assigned to wash toilets. Here, he learned to smoke and fight, and act like a thug.
It's just that this is just the way he blends into his surroundings, and its essence does not deteriorate because of it, but rather hones his resilience. Huang not only gets along with his "big brother" roommate, who is seven years older than him and covered in scars, but he also teaches him how to read.
He said:"Being there doesn't mean learning badly, it's learning to be strong and adaptable. ”
To this day, Huang is still grateful for that experience in an interview, even jokingly saying, "No one can wash the toilet cleaner and no one can wash the dishes more efficiently than me."
It wasn't until 1974 that Huang was able to transfer to a regular school because of his parents' immigration, and thus began his career as a top student.
At the age of 16, Huang was admitted to the electrical engineering department of Oregon State University, and he also gained love, and he once made a promise to his girlfriend LoriIn 10 years, when I am 30 years old, I must become the CEO of the company.
Before founding NVIDIA, Huang worked for AMD and LSI (Juji), unlike Silicon Valley technology maniacs, Huang understands both technology and sales, and when he worked at LSI, he took the initiative to transfer from the chip design department to the sales department, because consumers will not care about you graduating from **, they will only care about the meaning of your product.
This part-time job allowed him to meet his future business partners Chris and Preim.
At the beginning of 1993, the 10-year contract was approaching, and the three officially founded NVIDIA in California, USA, determined to build a graphics chip empire.
In his day-to-day life, Huang has a "naughty boy" personality.
He will leisurely go to the night market to buy twist flowers; also once strayed into the female singer's street live broadcast as a passerby, and ordered a song by Lady Gaga by the way; At Xiaomi's launch event in 2013, Huang stood on the platform and shouted "Xiaomi mighty" in Chinese.
But in the field of chips, Huang is a ruthless character, known as the "most belligerent" Chinese in Silicon Valley.
He once put down harsh words to the big brothers of the industry, Intel and AMD:
"Even Intel's 10x increase in graphics computing power can't match NVIDIA's. ”
"I haven't followed AMD in years, and the difference in quality between us is 9:0. ”
Dare to declare war on the old-timers, Huang Jenxun is confident.
Nvidia is the first chip company in history with a market value of up to one trillion dollars, and its market value was once 79x, AMD's 47 times.
The biggest beneficiary of the war has never been either of the parties involved in the war, but the one who sells **. ”
Nvidia is the one who sells **. Some people have assessed that a ChatGPT needs 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips to run.
It's just that no matter how great the ideal is, it needs to be reached step by step.
It took 20 years, why did Nvidia become a god?
Looking back at the history of NVIDIA, whether it is the metaverse, cryptocurrency, or AI, Huang Jenxun, the craze that swept the technology, has declined.
He once said, "As a company, as an entrepreneur, you have to be very hungry to succeed more than your opponents want you to die." ”
Nvidia has stepped on the wind of the times many times, and it is not a fortune from heaven, but Huang Jenxun dares to take risks and make bets, and his two key choices directly send Nvidia to the unparalleled chip championship.
In the 80s of the 20th century, Silicon Valley in the United States set off a vigorous fabless revolution.
The number of fabless chip companies is growing, not only Nvidia, but also giants Qualcomm and Marvell, which occupy the commanding heights of the global chip industry.
The reality is that building a fab is very expensive and costs billions to operate, and Sanders once compared a semiconductor fab to a pet shark in a swimming pool, which is expensive to raise and could eventually kill you, which is not something a startup can afford.
Huang has a strategy:Only design chips, not make chips.
At the time, Huang's start-up capital was only $40,000, and after meeting with TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou, the two companies began a 26-year partnership, with TSMC making Nvidia's chips, and Nvidia being able to travel lightly, concentrate firepower and resources, and focus on chip design.
But NVIDIA's real moat is to create the GPU era, relying on software platform to drive money.
For a long time, Intel has absolute dominance in the CPU field, and the CPU is the first processor, which is equivalent to the "brain" of the computer. Nvidia has chosen a path off the beaten path.
In 1999, in order to correspond to Intel's CPU, NVIDIA launched the world's first GPU, the GeForce 256 graphics card, which laid the foundation for its future rise.
The essence of NVIDIA GPUs is parallel computing.
What is the difference between a CPU and a GPU in terms of graphics? To borrow the analogy of an UP master, compared with "1 doctor doing 100 simple arithmetic problems" and "100 elementary school students doing 100 simple arithmetic problems together", the GPU is more efficient in terms of the time spent on both.
In order to open up the market, Huang made a key decision:
He secretly started a project called CUDA with the aim of creating a general-purpose parallel computing architecture.
To this end, Nvidia invests $500 million a year, while its annual revenue was less than $3 billion at the time, and the huge investment has made Huang questionable, calling it "unprofitable technology".
Huang withstood the pressure, and the reason why he dared to gamble was that he was optimistic about GPU general-purpose computing, and when Intel and AMD were busy fighting the clock war, he boldly predicted that in the future, microprocessors would be used in other fields such as AI. At that time, there were still 10 years before the outbreak of AI.
In June 2006, the CUDA architecture was officially launched. Just a year later, American computer scientist Andrew Ng built the first deep learning model based on the CUDA GPU, and then used this model to successfully identify a cat from 10 million images**.
This has triggered the industry's best and made people see the hope of running AI computing at low cost, and GPUs have quickly sparked in the scientific research community.
Huang's advanced prediction and gamble regardless of the cost made Nvidia prepare in advance when the wind came, stepped out of the shadow of Intel, and began an amazing reversal of 20 times in five years, thus becoming the first winner in the AI era.
Nvidia's relationship with the AI wave was planted by Huang himself in 2016.
Huang is a workaholic who has always been hands-on, and at the beginning of OpenAI's founding, he personally handed over the world's first DGX, which was Nvidia's strongest floating-point GPU at the time.
Huang signed the server he gifted to OpenAI, and with Huang's help, OpenAI launched ChatGPT six years later and reduced the speed of update iterations to one month. When ChatGPT swept the world, NVIDIA, as a chip manufacturer, took advantage of the rapid development of the AIGC wave.
Huang asserted: "The iPhone moment for AI has arrived. ”
But his ambition is not just to provide "arms dealers" for chips, but to become the technical infrastructure for AI.
Big defeat: "I want to live".
As "the most aggressive Chinese in Silicon Valley," Huang has only four important things in his life: work, think, help others, and create.
Most entrepreneurs are dead, and Huang's fighting power is largely drawn from the black vitality of failure.
Along the way, NVIDIA's road to the top can be described as stumbling, hovering on the edge of life and death several times. Unlike those who are keen to talk about their achievements, Huang has always been comfortable with his failures. "At Nvidia, I experienced failures, great failures, all of which were humiliating and embarrassing, and almost brought us to ruin," he said. ”
In the face of failure, some people have sunk, but Huang's desire to live has always saved him from danger.
"I have a will to live that surpasses the will of almost all people who want to kill me. ”
At the beginning of the business, Huang was desperate. In 1995, after two years of polishing, NVIDIA's first product, NV1 display chip, came out, unfortunately, this product not only did not set off a revolution in the industry, but also almost made Nvidia go bankrupt.
Unlike the mainstream "triangle texture mapping" approach in the market, NVIDIA achieved a new "quadrilateral texture mapping" approach, and it took Huang a year before Huang realized that the company's design was the wrong strategy and not technically up to standard. At the same time, the technology is structurally incompatible with Windows 95, released by Microsoft.
There is no doubt that Windows 95 is the future of the PC, and if Nvidia finishes Sega's console, it means that they have created a product that is incompatible with Windows.
Huang realized he was wrong and that he "had to stop."
In an effort to salvage the project, Huang admitted his mistake to Sega and secured $7 million in R&D funding to redevelop the new chip.
Even so, the company had only enough money to last for 30 days, and in order to survive, Huang had to cut off more than 100 employees to more than 30. For the first time, he tasted the bitter fruit of defeat, but he could afford to lose before he could win.
Two years later, Huang built the Riva 128, which shook up the burgeoning 3D market, selling millions of units in just four months on the market.
Until now, Huang's opening line has always been the same: "The company is only 30 days away from bankruptcy" to motivate employees, and the triangle has become what the NVIDIA headquarters building looks like today.
After this battle, Huang realized that he was not a hero to compete with reality, but that he was brave to put down his face and turn around at the right time. In a speech at National Taiwan University years later, he said that "being honest about mistakes and humbly asking for help is the hardest thing for smart, successful people to learn."
Jensen Huang gave a speech at the National Taiwan University.
Huang's second setback was in the mobile market.
In 2007, Steve Jobs "reinvented the mobile phone", and the iPhone fired the first shot of smartphones in the mobile Internet era, and since then the smartphone chip market has been full of gunsmoke.
Huang saw the huge potential of the mobile market and invested 3$6.7 billion, the acquisition of ICERA's modem business, but Tegra series chips, due to old architecture, high power consumption, lack of baseband, and **, etc., the market share continues to decline, at the same time, Qualcomm and MediaTek rose against the trend and seized a large part of the country.
On second thought, in 2015, Huang broke his wrist and gave up on the mobile phone market.
In retrospect, Huang said, "Nvidia's mission is to build computers that can 'solve problems that ordinary computers can't,' and we should focus on that vision and make our unique contributions." ”
This strategic retreat and abandonment has allowed Huang to focus on the core of the strategy, creating a new market — robotics with neural network processors and a secure architecture that runs AI algorithms.
During the PC market, Huang faced a strong threat from Intel and AMD, because there was no CPU technology, Nvidia had to rely on the platform of the two giants, but Nvidia's development was limited by the giants, and Huang faced a choice: either stick to the graphics chip, or expand the front and enter the CPU.
However, Huang Jenxun still increased his investment in 2008 when his operating income fell by 16%, and it can be said that NVIDIA is the only chip company that still adheres to graphics and parallel computing technology after 30 years of entrepreneurship, and the focus is finally fruitful in exchange for fruitful results.
Huang's attitude toward defeat has deeply influenced Nvidia's corporate culture.
He has said in public speeches that a company that does not foster a culture of risk-taking and tolerate failure cannot inherently encourage innovation. To accomplish this, NVIDIA has built a culture of intellectual honesty.
In an open letter, he stressed that Nvidia employees should review the direction of the strategy from time to time to see if it violates first principles. The so-called first principles is to return to the most basic essence of affairs, analyze without any bias, and find the best solution to achieve the goal or solve the problem. Elon Musk uses this principle to think about Tesla's corporate layout.
The point of intellectual honesty is to enable everyone to change their strategy and continue to innovate after a quick failure.
Epilogue: Running Hunter
The cruelty of the business world is that if you don't advance, you will retreat, and if you don't run, you will be eliminated.
Huang once proposed the famous "Huang's Law":
Every 6 months, the graphics performance of the graphics card is doubled, which is 3 times faster than Moore's Law.
Imagination is wild, prophecy is self-proven. According to this law, NVIDIA continues to update and iterate its products, leaving many competitors behind and becoming the hegemon of graphics cards.
Nvidia has been chasing his dreams at least five times and is close to saying goodbye to the industry, but Huang has never doubted himself, believing that "if failure doesn't knock you down, it can make you grow."
In the face of restrictions on U.S. chip exports, as well as the self-developed chips of companies such as Open AI and Microsoft, Nvidia has many potential risks, but Huang's sense of crisis is everywhere.
For more than 30 years, he has been leading LinkedIn Weida to fall, run, fall again, and continue to run ......Until you run past all your opponents and run to the top of the food chain.
As he put it, "Maybe you're running for food, maybe you're running for food so you don't get used as food by others, and you often can't know what situation you're in, no matter what, keep running." ”
Run, don't walk slowly!
References: 1].The legendary history of the rise of Nvidia (NVIDIA) - from the graphics card overlord to the AI king, Zhenyi Technology.
2].From cleaning toilets to a net worth of $43.5 billion! Huang's secret to success revealed: Never wear a watch, new Zhiyuan.
3].After 27 years of entrepreneurship and 27 years of boasting, he finally overturned Intel and Huashang Taoluo.
4].Nvidia - the ability of technological innovation against the wind, Chinese and foreign corporate culture.