Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…I forgot the number, but it was a very successful chip. I don’t think it was RIVA anything. It was a games chip. Of course, it was successful. In fact, his prediction came true. Not only did it solve ambiguous financial problems, it prevented from being bankrupt. Not only did it do that, it also started to make them a major customer of TSMC within two or three years. They did become one of the biggest five customers of TSMC. Very successful chip. There was a great partnership forged there. TSMC would fab the chips, would manufacture them, NVIDIA would design them. That is true all the way to today at immense scale. But it hasn’t always been easy, and it hasn’t always been perfect. I want to go to this moment in 2009 on the 40-nanometer node, where development was slower than TSMC had hoped, and it was costing customers like NVIDIA time and money. Can you share the story of how this came to be and how it was resolved? Well, I decided to give the CEO job to a potential successor while I would still retain the chairmanship. In Taiwan, usually the chairman is taught me anyway, even though CEO is another person. The problem you just mentioned happened during the period when someone else was the CEO. Apparently, it was a manufacturing problem. It was also a quality problem. It was a quality problem that the CEO first reported to me. The CEO insisted that our people, we had the director of quality insisted that TSMC was not at fault. On that basis, on the basis of our quality manager’s arguments, he had not offered NVIDIA anything. Now as far as the manufacturing problem was concerned, it was a you problem, and everybody was suffering from it. Of course, NVIDIA at that time was perhaps the biggest customer of that node, the 40-nanometer node.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.