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It comes from Chang'an, Liaoyang
30 mins ago · The official account of the Political and Legal Committee of the Liaoyang Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China
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Recently, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a star American artificial intelligence chip company, went to Taiwan to entertain many executives of Taiwanese supply chain manufacturers.
Huang's trip is aimed at participating in the Taipei International Information Technology Show, which opens on June 4.
When talking about Taiwan's importance in the global technology industry, Huang said that "we will strengthen cooperation with the chip industry on the island" and made openly politically inappropriate remarks about Taiwan.
Was it an unintentional mistake, or was it intentional, and why did Huang make such a big fuss?
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Jensen Huang: From a troubled teenager to a "leather-clad leader."
Originally from Zhejiang, Huang was born in 1963 in Tainan, Taiwan Province, China, to an intellectual family of chemical engineers and a teacher.
Huang moved with his family to Thailand as a child, and at the age of 9, he was sent with his brother to his uncle in the United States with his parents for a "better education."
However, the destitute uncle sent the two to a rural boarding school in Kentucky, which was "full of martial virtues." There, Huang learned to smoke and climb trees, and made his way through the "big gang" of American-style rural campuses by helping the school's "gang brothers" catch up on classes.
It has to be said that this unique "Jianghu years" laid the groundwork for Huang Jenxun's future style of "AI godfather" and "Silicon Valley leather jacket spokesperson".
In 1993, at the age of 30, Huang founded Nvidia, a semiconductor company in California that designs and sells graphics processing units (GPUs).
On June 6, 2024, Nvidia's stock price soared to $1,222.99, with a market capitalization of more than $3,005.3 billion, surpassing Apple to become the world's second-highest company by market capitalization after Microsoft.
At the same time, Huang's worth also exceeded the $100 billion mark in one fell swoop, making him one of the "super-rich" on the Forbes list of the world's richest people.
Huang introduces NVIDIA products.
NVIDIA: From selling graphics cards to selling chips.
Hometown assistance - "win-win" cooperation with TSMC.
Nvidia's main products in the early days were GPUs, that is, computer graphics cards.
The mass production of Nvidia's graphics cards is inseparable from the help of Huang's hometown of Taiwan, China.
At the end of the 20th century, Taiwan Province actively laid out the semiconductor industry, and invited Zhang Zhongmou, a technology expert, from the American semiconductor industry to settle in the Taiwan Industrial Research Institute.
Under the leadership of Chang Zhongmou, the Taiwan Industrial Research Institute, together with Philips of the Netherlands, Formosa Plastics Group and other capitals, jointly founded TSMC.
So, Huang found Zhang Zhongmou, who is also a Chinese-American, and hoped that TSMC would provide chip foundry for NVIDIA, and the two hit it off.
With the blessing of TSMC, NVIDIA's image processing technology and semiconductor products quickly gained popularity, and won cooperation opportunities with Dell Computer, Gateway and other companies.
TSMC's wafer foundry model was quickly accepted by the semiconductor industry, laying the foundation for it to become the "king of chip foundry" in the future.
Huang participates in the onboarding ceremony of TSMC's Arizona factory.
Lucky one - hit the era three times.
The three outlets are computer games, blockchain and artificial intelligence, and these are inseparable from computer chips.
As the absolute boss in the computer chip industry, Nvidia's market value has been soaring. From 2016 to September 2018, Bitcoin's market capitalization skyrocketed from $14 billion to $175 billion with its meteoric rally, creating a new industry myth.
In particular, the breakthrough of artificial intelligence technology has given rise to a huge demand for computing power, and NVIDIA, which provides AI computing power chips, has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of this trend.
OpenAI has reportedly used about 25,000 Nvidia GPUs to train ChatGPT, and more than 4.1 million Nvidia GPUs would need to be deployed if Google were to apply the technology to every search.
According to Wells Fargo data, Nvidia has a 98% market share in the data center AI chip market, while AMD, which ranks second, has a market share of only 1.2%, and Intel, which ranks third, has less than 1%.
Not only that, but the autonomous driving of electric vehicles also requires the use of NVIDIA's chips for computational reasoning.
In the new energy era, vehicle specification chips have stepped onto the historical stage and become an important standard for judging the performance of new energy vehicles.
At present, some high-end electric vehicles in China, such as the NVIDIA Orin X chip used in the recently popular Xiaomi car, have a computing power of 254TOPS for a single chip.
Unintentional or deliberate?
As a shrewd businessman, Huang is accustomed to "talking business" and acting in financial interest. As a successful entrepreneur, Huang is "able to bend and stretch" and his political stance is erratic.
Previously, Huang repeatedly "got into the ring" with U.S. Commerce Secretary Raimondo to oppose restrictions on chip exports to China in the name of "national security".
Recently, however, Huang Jenxun went against the norm by going to Taiwan shortly after Lai Qingde took office and making inappropriate remarks about Taiwan in an informal setting while visiting a night market, and at the scene of his blockbuster speech "Breaking Moore's Law, the Age of Robots is Coming," he used the expression "Taiwan, China" instead.
Huang's contradictory words and deeds reflect the contradictory reality.
A helpless move under the strict control of the United States.
Over the past few years, the U.S. government has become more and more pathologically dominating over technology companies, often requiring them to cooperate with the government's foreign policy through bills and executive orders.
Recently, the United States has continuously increased its means of "using Taiwan to contain China" and "using core to contain China", and even openly sent a congressional delegation to attend Lai Qingde's inauguration ceremony, and even asked Secretary of State Blinken to come forward to "congratulate" Lai on his assumption of office.
As the "godfather of AI" in the United States, Huang's trip to Taiwan cannot be ruled out because he was forced by the Biden administration to show "political correctness" in Taiwan in exchange for more policy support in the United States.
The inevitable choice after the pursuit of profits.
At the end of the day, Huang is just an entrepreneur and a "mason" on the Biden administration's "small courtyard walls."
Since the implementation of semiconductor export controls, the United States has asked Nvidia not to export GPU chips with "the highest processing power" to China. (See also the article "We won't sit idly by!") 》）
In order to keep the Chinese market, Nvidia developed a "special reduced version" of the H20 chip, but the weakened chip obviously could not meet the needs of Chinese mainland, and sales were cold.
At the same time, the competitiveness of chips of companies such as Huawei has increased rapidly, and Nvidia has to take measures such as price cuts to cope with severe challenges.
"High-end chips are not allowed to be sold, and low-end chips cannot be sold", the importance of the mainland market to Nvidia has declined for a period of time.
As a profit-seeking businessman, Huang has taken the mainland less seriously, and his behavior of stepping on the mainland's "red line" seems to make sense.
Expediency in technical cooperation.
Nvidia is the world's largest semiconductor company by market capitalization, and Taiwan is the world's major chip manufacturing center.
As technology competition intensifies, deepening cooperation with semiconductor manufacturers on the island is an inevitable means for NVIDIA to consolidate its market leadership.
A few days ago, Huang Jenxun said in an interview at the Dell Technologies Global Conference that Nvidia needs Taiwan, and the entire technology industry is also heavily dependent on Taiwan.
Therefore, after weighing the mainland's reaction and his own interests, Huang chose to arrive in Taiwan after the PLA encirclement exercise to show his determination to cooperate with Taiwanese companies, hoping to strengthen Nvidia's chip supply chain.
In recent years, the "chip war" has become the main front of the overall war against China by the United States, and Huang's contradictory words and deeds are just a microcosm of the dilemma of American high-tech companies in the context of the Biden administration's promotion of the "chip war".
However, no matter how frantically suppressed by the United States, it will not stop the development of China's chip industry, but will accelerate China's breakthrough in chip technology.
As at the press conference of the National People's Congress and the National People's Congress in March this year, spokesman Lou Qinjian pointed out sharply:
"Any known technology can't get stuck, and at most it's a matter of time."
The pictures in the article come from the Internet
Source: Ninety Thousand Miles