STEP 3: POWER THE DIGITAL VERSION OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD
NVIDIA’S ACHILLES’ HEEL
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Why Read: A deep dive on the world’s largest chip company and its biggest potential weaknesses in the years ahead.
When CEO Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang took the stage at Future in Review for a Centerpiece Conversation in the spring of 2010, NVIDIA was laser-focused on gaming, still just a few months shy of the release of its flagship GPU for that purpose: the GeForce GTX 580.
Today, nearly 15 years and a closetful of black leather jackets later, Jensen has built NVIDIA into one of the world’s most powerful and innovative AI chip companies.
Behind closed doors, industry analysts whisper that NVIDIA has too much power in the allocation of chip resources or that it’s dangerous for an entire industry to rely so much on any one company. But while both of those concerns may be valid, those same analysts are also awed by NVIDIA’s ability to test the bounds of Moore’s law.
There is good reason for that supremacy: as a technical innovator, NVIDIA is second to none. And Jensen’s timing in releasing new computing systems, software stacks, and data center tech to address challenges and problems with strong market demand at just the right time is almost spooky.
“We built NVIDIA like a computing stack, or neural network, in four layers: hardware, system software, platform software, and applications,” Jensen wrote in the company’s 2022 Annual Review. “Each layer is open to computer makers, service providers, and developers to integrate with their offerings.”
