Jensen Huang: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, you mean from Broadcom or something like that? Yeah, sure. You’ve got to pay somebody. I think the ASIC margins are incredibly good, from what I can tell. They believe it too. They’re quite proud of their incredible ASIC margins. So, you asked the question why. A long time ago, we just didn’t have the ability to do it. At the time, I didn’t deeply internalize how difficult it would be to build a foundation AI lab like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the fact that they needed huge investments from the supplier themselves. We just weren’t in a position to make the multi-billion dollar investment into Anthropic so that they could use our compute. But Google and AWS were. They put in huge investments in the beginning so that Anthropic, in return, used their compute. We just weren’t in a position to do that at the time. I would say my mistake is I didn’t deeply internalize that they really had no other options, that a VC would never put in $5-10 billion of investment into an AI lab with the hopes of it turning out to be Anthropic. So that was my miss. But even if I understood it, I don’t think we would’ve been in a position to do that at the time. But I’m not going to make that same mistake again. I’m delighted to invest in OpenAI, and I’m delighted to help them scale, and I believe it’s essential to do so. And then, when I was able to, when Anthropic came to us, I’m delighted to be an investor, delighted to help them scale. We just weren’t, at the time, able to do it. If I could rewind everything—and Nvidia could have been as big back then as we are now—I would’ve been more than happy to do it. This is actually quite interesting. For many years Nvidia has been the company in AI making money, making lots of money. Now you’re investing it. It’s been reported that you’ve done up to $30 billion in OpenAI and $10 billion in Anthropic. But now their valuations have increased, and I’m sure they’ll continue to increase. So if over these many years you were giving them the compute, you saw where it was headed, and they were worth like one tenth what they’re worth now a couple years ago—or even a year ago in some cases and you had all this cash — there’s a world where either Nvidia themselves becomes a foundation lab, does a huge investment to make that possible, or has made the deals you’ve made now at current valuations much earlier on. And you had the cash to do it. So I am curious, actually, why not have done it earlier?…

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