Do you know how difficult it is for a company to expand their business to new markets? Do you know difficult it is the build up a customer base in a market?
This isn't just doing addition and subtraction on n GPUs/year. This is business. We wouldn't have so many businessmen if business was that simple.
This is exactly how it played out, too, which is why Huawei chips have started taking inference workloads in China and we're now starting to see them in training too.
1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
It's a no-brainer. If there were no export controls, Nvidia would be taking all that oxygen out of the room. Chinese chip efforts would be put back by at least 5 years, and probably more like 10.
Sure, they might get there eventually but Nvidia would still have that lead when they do.
> 1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.
There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China. You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff. If the harm to the domestic chip industry would really outweigh the benefits, the CCP would issue the order and no-one would buy the Nvidia chips and that would be that.
Clearly untrue, because many companies are using the gimped H20s and the full H200s (both legally imported or smuggled) despite official government policy being silicon-self-sufficiency. It's a bit more complex than "CCP issues order and everyone immediately falls into line".
> There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China.
I'm not saying it "hurt China", I'm saying there's a fine line to tread between supporting Chinese AI models now, at the expense of the Chinese silicon industry in 20 years' time. The US export ban forced the issue and took the alternative off the table.
Generally this does work. China is pretty resistant to it as countries go.
See how difficult it is for the US Chip market to get off the ground, because it is so easy to just buy from other countries. A government directive to "Build It", only goes so far. So the Chinese Gov directing its companies to build chips, would have headwinds if Nvidia chips were available.
You can get like 200% margin on selling GPUs to PRC smugglers in Taiwan. It's a very busy industry with lots of players so the margin gets spread around. Recently a big ring of them was busted and sent to prison here so most people try to have as many middlemen between them and the guy that puts it on the boat as possible, because apparently the prison sentence is quite long.
I had someone offer me 10x whatever I bought for (not even MSRP just whatever I paid) for "as many GPUs as I could get my hands on." I asked hundreds? Yeah. Thousands? "Can you get us thousands???" It's fuckin nutty.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
Finally, because he's of Han Chinese origin, I bet they thought they could get the media to coordinate a narrative around him that will force him out. Of course, he sort of made it easy to pin something on him.
That’s what I think it’s going on… the “allegations” are ridiculous at best. He is the most “normal” of the bunch by a long short.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."
Like, internal Nvidia KYC policy changed per Huang to facilitate GPU sales to Megaspeed.
Whether or not he realized it, cared, or was aware and doing it on purpose, he was acting as an enormously powerful lobbyist and influencer on the US as an agent of China.
If only the economist was equally "concerned" about other CEO misconducts...
He's operating in a highly charged political environment in which his credibility is a key asset. He can't effectively advocate for NVIDIA's interests if his credibility is damaged.
And this goes directly to his credibility on the most politically charged issue of all: The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, and NVIDIA's role in it.
I agree it's a tragedy for NVIDIA, he seems to have been exceptional as a CEO, it's just too late now.
As far as I can tell, most of the reports were just recounting factual information. The narrative was already there. The media didn't create it.
This X post makes a lot of sense: https://x.com/antfeedapp/status/2120454507448651933
What do you mean by "this"? One thing I agree with is that we knew about this story for months. I've read about Jensen's affair with Alice Huang and her ties to the Chinese government at least five months ago.
The thing that triggered the current reporting was the new sourcing about U.S. intelligence findings that came out in late October. So mainstream news started reporting on it once they had sources they found trustworthy.
The confusing thing, though, is not that the story suddenly became big, but why it didn't become big much earlier.
Did they ever find the uranium in Iraq? Good luck with those guys.
Whenever I see these kinds of stories I think of this, written a century ago:
Hanlon's razor seems to apply here, so I don't really think it's a psyop. Simply information many (top secret) parties were aware of for a while that other people who are incentivized to tell everyone eventually caught up on.
I'm tired of hearing hanlon's razor tossed around. How about the inverse: I attribute malice if doing so makes the system better and explains your behavior. Even if you are just a fool, your actions impact others and have the same consequences of malice. I hold you to account like a criminal if you act like one.
I recommend watching it if the power of media interests you.
They could have easily just waited a month or two and let this all just go away.
It's the outside pressure.
Does it just come down to virtue signaling pressure?
- He is married and had multiple affairs
- He slept with a subordinate
- He slept with a business partner
- He was compromised by a Chinese spy
These are all just facts - the narrative writes itself.
I think whoever is next will not always have the affinity for gaming. Any finance person who looks at the unit economics of gaming would conclude that they should allocate next to no chip supply to gaming GPUs.
An RTX 5090 is the same die size as a server GPU.
An RTX 5090 is a reticle sized chip.
nvidia got their strong position in AI now by providing CUDA to researchers who couldn't afford their own supercomputing cluster. and now the entirety of machine learning revolves around CUDA.
once you fixate on the business and lock out the masses, you instantly elect to become a fossil like IBM.
> WSJ reports that details of the affair were known to top officials, including SoS Rubio and CIA Ratcliffe, “going back to last year,” and were brought to President Trump; the administration took no action to blacklist Megaspeed.
Does this this sound like people who want to bring him down or people who wanted to protect him?
Is it so unreasonable to expect American tech companies to 'ignore' the market of a country that is supplying materiel to the countries that America is currently engaged in a proxy war, and actual war with?
If not, exactly what would China have to do for this to be a reasonable expectation, and something that we would expect American companies to do under their own volition?
What the fuck are you talking about - it's obvious this guy broke the export bans - the affairs are just a media circus to distract from that fact - not only should he be ousted he should be going to jail if there's any sort of legal system in the US left...
This isn’t about right or wrong. If he knowingly broke the law he should be punished.
There are a few major differences. Apple's devices aren't under export control so Apple takes no risk selling. Nvidia had to take legal risks to do this.
On the stock side, Apple devices are almost never supply constrained. Nvidia's never get to sit on the shelf. Nvidia can jack up the prices to the sky and still not keep up with demand.
Between these 2 things, the risk to sell to China looks like more than only profit motivated.
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
Pretending there was no China revenue books?? That's an insanely huge financial lie
Absolutely. Since the midterms, many politicians see going after Jensen as a way to appease the pitchfork mobs of anti-AI/data center voters (it doesn't matter if that position makes no sense).
So was Huang playing along as part of some other US-Chinese plot?
Was he a pawn, or go-between, in US-Chinese relations.
Maybe the cheating was a cover, or pawn with benefits?
It may be the case that his ouster helps certain people. That has nothing whatsoever to do with how the blame should be apportioned or what the sensible course of action is.
That she is a "foreign agent" is not an established fact whatsoever. Sure does make for a good headline though, especially if you want to oust Jensen.
- he lied about one affair
- the other one was with a direct subordinate
BK fafo’d at Intel with a report and that was that.
Jensen seemingly took that as a challenge and doubled down.
If this level of ego is what’s necessary for this system to thrive, let it all burn to the ground.
There are many regulations, sanctions and restrictions I disagree with. That doesn’t mean I can or should try to bypass them on a large scale.
He may have been right, doesn’t mean he gets to break the law.
And then news came out that he was having an affair with a direct-report. Unfavorable and pretty unforgivable even before the spy story.
I am not entirely sure I buy the Spy thesis. And Alice's husband knew this all along. Which makes the whole thing more doggy.
And Jensen's view isn't wrong. There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions. Not when they are the second-largest economy and still rapidly advancing. There are better ways to handle this, one huge ban isn't one.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.