0:53
Jensen Huang bet hundreds of millions on CUDA, an unproven platform for machine learning, when critics said NVIDIA would fail. For three years nothing happened. The bet eventually made NVIDIA dominant in AI.
Jensen Huang bet hundreds of millions on CUDA, an unproven platform for machine learning, when critics said NVIDIA would fail. For three years nothing happened. The bet eventually made NVIDIA dominant in AI.
Jensen started to see more and more people talk about this, talk about machine learning and things like that. They bet on CUDA, which is this unproven technology. What happened was they started to see that scientists were using it for intense calculations, for maybe like protein folding and things like that. They started going that direction. They're like, whoa, maybe this is a novel use case. He bet hundreds of millions of dollars, not just one year's profit, but hundreds of millions of dollars on this thing. And then what happened was, turns out that nobody was interested in the first year. And then actually for the next 2, 3 years after that, nobody was really interested. It was lukewarm. But it took a lot of effort. He saw it moving in that direction. He stayed with that bet and thank God it worked out for them because that's a situation where it was getting really bad. In fact, he set aside $200 million just for returns and all of the critics were getting pissed. It's like, this is Nvidia's about to die. To Jensen's credit, he stuck with it and he had the conviction to stick with
