Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Big fish from a little island

Hi, it's Vlad and Debby reporting from Taipei. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang is being hailed as Taiwan's favorite son this week, dominating the s

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang is being hailed as Taiwan's favorite son this week, dominating the spotlight at the annual Computex trade show. But first...

Today's must-reads:

Last of Us multiplayer game faced setbacks at Sony
• Fake AI content could be "highly disruptive" to financial markets
• Suspected Chinese hackers allegedly breached the US Navy

The big boss, the only boss

Jen-Hsun Huang, born in southern Taiwan and educated on the US West Coast, takes a page out of Steve Jobs' book of founder-CEO management: concentrating decision-making power in his hands and taking risks that rule-by-committee businesses dare not.

Today, going by the Anglicized Jensen, he's a wealthy man thanks to the AI frenzy fueling demand for Nvidia GPUs and catapulting his company's market value to new highs for a chipmaker. He's also "the pride of Taiwan," according to the National Taiwan University scholar who introduced him to students over the weekend.

Huang gave a commencement address to graduates on Saturday, where he recounted his company's early existential struggles — Nvidia wouldn't have survived without the aid of games maker Sega Sammy Holdings Inc. — and also spoke of the risk and cost required to make Nvidia's CUDA processing cores popular. Started in 2007, those extra bits of complexity added to Nvidia graphics cards are now paying off by making it the go-to supplier for artificial intelligence training.

"You either run for food, or you run to avoid becoming food," Huang told an admiring audience. "Either way, run."

It was a succinct summation of his approach to business over the course of a 40-year career. Nvidia began in the mid-'90s with no special advantage among 3D graphics accelerator makers and it won. The name remains synonymous with fast graphics cards for games — though one particularly unloved design will always carry the nickname "leafblower" for its noisy cooling solution.

After trying and failing with various expansion ventures over the years — such as building chips for mobile devices — Nvidia found its golden goose with AI acceleration. And Huang deserves the credit, having committed everyone at Nvidia to the task years ago. "100,000 engineering years could have been spent on something else," he told an audience of journalists on Tuesday, at his fifth public appearance in a handful of days.

Like Jobs, Huang has signature attire: leather jackets, no matter how hot the venue he's in. The Nvidia boss is also prone to making strong statements, such as decrying the harm and danger of US trade sanctions on China in a recent interview. He'd rather be able to sell his chips to China than have Chinese startups build substitutes.

An adept marketer, the Nvidia CEO pivoted from questions about AI risks — we have to be serious about them, he said — and geopolitical unease — Nvidia's supply chain is built for resilience and redundancy — to always point people back to his products.

Asked about competition from Intel Corp., the former champion of US chipmaking, Huang returned to his catchphrase of the week: "You have to run. Not walk, run."

The big story

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — days after making comments that he might pull out of Europe if he didn't feel he could meet the EU's regulations — said he plans to comply with the bloc's rules. Before coming to Europe, Altman spoke in Washington where he called for more regulation and said his "greatest fear" was that AI would cause significant harm.

One to watch

Watch the Bloomberg Technology TV interview with Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, who said she's cautious of Nvidia's stock.

Get fully charged

Elon Musk's private jet landed in Beijing in the billionaire's first visit to China in three years.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss seek an overseas reset for Gemini after losing money and staff.

Microsoft dodged further French privacy fines after making changes to the way it tracks users of Bing.

Wall Street is ready for Comcast CEO Brian Roberts's next dramatic move in a shifting media landscape.

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