In May 2023, the birth of Chat GPT made the entire artificial intelligence industry explode rapidly.
The computing power of hardware devices is the foundation of artificial intelligence development and application, and NVIDIA lost no time in launching the world's strongest artificial intelligence processor H100 after the announcement of Chat GPT.
With the unmatched power of the H100 and the priceless supply and demand relationship, NVIDIA's market capitalization has reached a peak of one trillion dollars.
The resurgence of NVIDIA is inseparable from one person, that is, founder and CEO - Huang Jenxun, who always appears in leather clothes and is now 60 years old.
It has also been 17 years since NVIDIA conducted research on artificial intelligence computing chips. After 17 years of sharpening a sword, how did Huang Jenxun lead LinkedIn Weida to the chip throne with terrible patience?
Stay in the United States at an early age
When Huang was 9 years old, his father sent him and his brother, a year older, to his uncle's house in Washington state for his education.
However, the uncle's family had limited financial means, and the brothers were soon sent to a rural boarding school in Kentucky. In Jensen Wong's recollections:
"This school is actually more like a juvenile correctional home where every child has a knife. And the classmate was tattooed all over his body. ”
Fortunately, the miserable life lasted only two years, and with Huang's parents coming to the United States, he finally had the opportunity to receive a formal education.
After leaving, he founded NVIDIA
Jensen graduated from Oregon State University in 1984 with a degree in electrical engineering. He later received his master's degree from Stanford University.
During his master's degree, he worked for AMD and then the chip giant LSI Logic.
Today's AMD 6000 series graphics cards
Presumably working in a chip company gave Huang enough experience that he resigned from LSI Logic in 1993 and founded his own company, NVIDIA.
He wants to be the king of graph computing in the world.
From the heroes chasing the deer to the stars holding the moon
Huang's entrepreneurial path was not smooth. At the beginning of NVIDIA's founding, Huang Jensen received this advice from analysts in the Bay Area:
"The market hasn't started yet, it's already a mess, there are almost 30 companies now, you better not do this."
Subsequent developments are indeed unsatisfactory.
The first product launched by NVIDIA with all the investment was NV1, which was not in the market, and only more than thirty of the more than 100 employees of the company remained.
On the cliff, the Japanese game console company Sega sent a lifesaver to Nvidia, a $7 million order. Although the project was abandoned by Sega before it came to fruition, the funds helped Nvidia survive the advent of the Microsoft era.
Sega II console
The Win95 era has opened, and graphics card companies on the market generally take Microsoft's D3D API interface lightly, and only NVIDIA fully and decisively supports Microsoft's interface.
Bet on the treasure, Huang Jenxun launched NV3, TNT and TNT2 three years later, along with Microsoft's market share increase, NVIDIA occupied the top of the graphics card chip market.
At the end of 1999, Huang Jenxun proposed the GPU concept, and NVIDIA's new graphics card GeForce 256 launched ushered in the next era of the chip industry, thereby sweeping all competitors to the edge of the market.
Geforce 256
But Huang Jenxun is not satisfied, his eyes have been set on the next era.
The era of artificial intelligence
In 2006, NVIDIA started research on artificial intelligence computing chips. The CUDA core of the main research and development of graphics cards.
Coincidentally, the birth of digital currency brought NVIDIA an unexpected income. Since 2013, the "mine tide" has pushed the price of all graphics cards on the market to a fixed point, and it is common for the price to double, and NVIDIA's graphics cards are still in short supply even if the price is high during this period.
Finally, with the continuous emergence of AI models, NVIDIA's H100 can increase the computing speed of large language models by 30 times compared with the previous generation, and there is no competitor in the industry. In this regard, Huang Jenxun took LinkedIn Weida to the throne of the chip world, and at this moment, they are likely to be climbing to the next peak.
H100
Do you think artificial intelligence will be the mainstream of the future? Will NVIDIA still face opponents?