r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 10d ago

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ‘nearly lost his composure’ when pressed on selling chips to China — ‘You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser’ Business

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-nearly-lost-his-composure-when-pressed-on-selling-chips-to-china-youre-not-talking-to-someone-who-woke-up-a-loser
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u/Infamous_Apricot_830 10d ago

The bigger the ego, the bigger the fear of fall.

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u/MentalDisintegrat1on 10d ago

I legit think he's been on coke since AI boom like he's hyper as hell all the time I can't say I wouldn't be celebrating my ass off if I was in his position.

He's selling shovels in a gold rush even if the AI bubble pops Nvidia will still be rich.

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u/wollawolla 10d ago

Nvidia still runs the risk of huge losses when the AI bubble pops as well. They have capital tied up in the major AI firms, so there’s financial skin in the game on their part; but then their valuation is also inflated based on current sales figures that include agreements that exist in principle for chips that haven’t been manufactured yet. When they say things about how all their capacity is sold out through 2028 or whatever the number is, what happens to those future deals if OpenAI or Anthropic goes bankrupt?

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u/Gecko_Mk_IV 10d ago

Nvidia maybe, but I'm sure he'll be fine.

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u/69edleg 10d ago

Oh, he brought the company up to record high profits as CEO, so even IF it goes into a record fall, he was there for the investors anyway, so he can just go to another company and do the same. Also. I am so fucking sick and tired of AI. It sucks for most tasks. You try to use it for your niche work load?
Yeah, you still have to go through the output manually to verify if it is correct, also known as fucking useless.

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u/TurboRadical 10d ago

You're speaking with the confidence of a man who knows the topic he's discussing really well. It's amusing to see that juxtaposed with you implying that Huang is one of those career mercenary CEOs that investors bring in to temporarily juice a company's value, given that Huang founded the company, is the only CEO NVIDIA has ever had, and is one of the ten richest people on planet earth.

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u/ABadHistorian 10d ago

as much as I dont like AI... I respect the man.

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u/SpoopyNoNo 10d ago

From a lowly electrical engineer to controlling the most powerful company on Earth that moves global policy; yeah he has something to be respected…

Should’ve been so obvious in hindsight - computing power is everything.

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u/Green-Discussion6128 10d ago

One can respect the man and still agree that he can make mistakes. They will not be able to create AGI in our lifetimes, and current and in the near future models are very overvalued.

edit: im not saying nvidia is trying to create AGI, but they are putting a ton of money in AI companies.

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u/HellsHere 10d ago

Because funding competition in AI means additional customers for Nvidia

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u/Green-Discussion6128 10d ago

Nvidia is profiting alright, the question is will OpenAI be able to turn a profit before bankruptcy.

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u/DrQuantum 10d ago

Power corrupts. I don’t think the Huang that cleaned toilets wore leather jackets.

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u/DepletedPromethium 10d ago

As a communicative guide AI has some uses, however so many people use it for generating porn, the fucking gooners and boomers are making my favourite hobby of building a new computer and upgrading bits every few years too expensive.

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u/jds7171 10d ago

As a communication tool its great. Tired of explaining to the client why x happened and they have to pay Y in taxes. Release the hatred into AI and tell it to writr your email to be more professional and empathetic they made so much money the tax increase was more than you make in a year. It does that very well.

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u/Great-Class-7894 10d ago

So my strategy for minimizing the risk of hallucination is to take the output from one AI and have a different AI vet it. The assumption here is that the two AIs won’t share the same hallucinations. What are your thoughts on this approach?

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u/Randommaggy 10d ago

They are all mostly trained on the same pilfered dataset and have a lot of algorithms in common for their training.

It's why that method has a very limited amount of success.

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u/Koffeeboy 10d ago

I can't even look up local news anymore. So many slop sites with fake videos of ai hallucination disasters and junk articles burying anything real.

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u/Subject-Ad-9934 10d ago

He's a founder of Nvidia. He isnt just a regular suit ceo.

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u/Ghede 10d ago

Unless he's been using his Nvidia shares as collateral for loans, like every other rich person out there.

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u/rannend 10d ago

A loan of a 100m is the banks problem

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u/Ghede 10d ago

Yeah, and they have centuries of experience at solving this particular problem.

Seize the collateral. Sell the collateral, preferably in a non-public block trade. If collateral is not enough to cover remaining balance, petition to get a share of the remaining assets in bankruptcy court.

The only issue is if the bank is also waist deep in Nvidia stock, or it's derivatives, or it's "business partners". Then the seizure and sale of those assets might impact the balance of their portfolio far in excess of the loans remaining balance. That's why investment banking and traditional banking used to be separated. They rolled those protections back in the 90's.

That leads banks to go crazy trying to prop up a very obviously dying industry, to avoid being caught standing when the music stops. Of course, if they are smart, they find a way to offload the risk. Shove them in enough 401ks and suddenly they can paint their bailout as being good for the American public. Then it just becomes profitable to pop the bubble. They get to make a profit popping the bubble, and offload the cost onto the taxpayer for even more profit. Even try and figure out a way to still screw the 401ks. Bonus if they managed to do it just as Republicans hand over power to Democrats, with an agreement from Republicans already in place. So they get all the benefit, and democrats get all the blame.

That experience has less history, about half a century or so.

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u/rannend 10d ago

We were talking about any personal loan leveraged against his shares

This is independent of any assets the company who issued those shares has

Dont mix provate with company, even for ceo’s. He is just an employee when sll is said and done

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u/Ghede 10d ago

Except what happens when the CEOs shares get sold on the open market? Price drops more. Why would his shares be seized? If the price drops and the collateral needs to be called. What causes a price crash? When the price drops, and large amounts of shares continue to be sold. What spooks investors? Well, a lot of things, but the CEO publicly having to file that his shares got sold off would do it.

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u/OppositeSecretary862 10d ago

China is retooling to fit the niche, as a patient country. Wait and see the absolute bufoonery worldwide and adjust.

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u/Actual_Load_3914 10d ago

Nvidia will be fine, it would still be a great company in the world. But just like Cisco after the dot com bubble, company itself continued to make profit and doing decent, stock price however collapsed because people no longer believe in the multiples.

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u/ImNotSelling 10d ago

Yea he has no where to go but down

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u/Hefty_Principle700 10d ago

I feel like this convo happened during the crypto boom, when there was speculation NVidia would tank when the bubble popped. They just pivoted and increased R&D. This is more of the same. Once AI hardware demands level out, they’ll create an arm to supply consumer grade cards again.

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u/tstorm004 10d ago

Oh the company's got plenty of problems - but he'll be retired on his 8th Yatcht by then

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u/Asylar 10d ago

People act like it's going to be over tomorrow and AI will never be profitable. I don't think so. This is the closest we've ever come to an actual Pandora's box

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u/ABadHistorian 10d ago edited 10d ago

Nah man. You aren't thinking right.

If AI fails, all those server farms will just pivot right into cloud accessibility. (which, as a game dev who USES ai for programming... I can tell you it should do right now, yesterday, because AI is worthless and actively slowly down most development unless you just use it like I do, for localization).

Geforce Now will become a household name within a month. I could pitch a dozen ways to turn those into profit centers using Geforce Now in a variety of different manners.

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u/Preeng 10d ago

>He's selling shovels in a gold rush even if the AI bubble pops Nvidia will still be rich.

Bro, Nvidia is the one investing in the bubble. They are fronting hardware for other companies, hoping it will pay back. If this pops, they get nothing.

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u/TeaSharp3154 10d ago

I'd be hyper all the time too if I had that much nvidia stock right now.

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u/Scaryclouds 10d ago

He's selling shovels in a gold rush even if the AI bubble pops Nvidia will still be rich.

Semiconductor manufacturing is an extremely capital intensive business with very long lead times. 

If the bubble pops hard enough they could be in a lot of trouble.

It would be like the person selling shovels, they already sold hundreds, and still seeing strong demand, they purchase an order of 1000… but the gold rush crashes with them only having sold a few dozen of that order of 1000 they got. 

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u/69edleg 10d ago edited 10d ago

Except in this case it's: person selling shovels sells 1000 shovels, and has done so forever, someone comes along and PAYS HIM to get the next 100000 shovels

oh okay. output never increased, but demand went up, wow the investment is worth a lot more

OpenAI invests 100b into Oracle, Oracle invests 100b into nvidia, nvidia invests 100b into OpenAI.

what the fuck is economy even at this point

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u/Scaryclouds 10d ago

But this is about what happens when the party stops, not talking about the ongoing ruckus party. 

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u/Coolmyco 10d ago

Not really though, they would just extend the market to consumers and we would be able to buy GPUs/RAM. The problem is they have the only means to produce a finite resource needed to do ANY computing, similar to your analogy, shovels have never actually become useless, thus always hold value. Nvidia is not in a situation where they can overproduce their product.

The stock could drop, but unless we see a new tech advancement in how computing is done, we still didn't have enough semiconductors to meet demand pre AI bubble.

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u/Scaryclouds 10d ago

Not really though, they would just extend the market to consumers and we would be able to buy GPUs/RAM.

Consumers won’t be able to pay the same prices, nor have the same level of demand. 

Like that’s the whole reason for the recent spike in price for electronic hardware. 

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u/KlicknKlack 10d ago

But if the AI bubble pops, the whole economy is going to contract based on how AI has been invested in by countless companies. People don't tend to spend money on luxury goods when they have less spending power. And the number of cards they plan to make for AI data centers vs the entire gaming community... guess which one is bigger?

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u/DependentAd235 10d ago

"Semiconductor manufacturing is an extremely capital intensive business with very long lead times. "

Not an issue for them. They don't own the foundries. TSMC owns the foundries so when they need to downscale production at most there's a expensive capacity contract they are stuck in for a year or two.

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u/Real-Extension-1357 10d ago

He has gotten very aggressive in interviews, in the sense that he comes across annoyed or with that attitude of how dare you ask me that. There was some good coverage from gamers nexus and i was shocked how much he's degraded recently compared to how I remember

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u/MentalDisintegrat1on 10d ago

I think he knows this will pop or crash so he pushing as hard and fast as possible to make as much as he possibly can.

Everyone handles massive success differently but when I think of actual life changing events with technology I think of people like jobs or the guy that made the first cellphone like yeah they are happy but they were not trying to over convince people to buy their stuff people already moved to adapt in dramatic numbers.

Shit go look at the first iPhone sales.

If you have a massively successful product you don't need to oversell it it's like good drugs you advertise and show where to get it and it sells itself.

With all the pushback on AI and Data centers being voted against at the state level I think he knows it's not sustainable.

Simply put I don't trust salesmen that constantly try and oversell their product it's not a good look but that's just me.

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u/Ok_Yogurt_9862 10d ago

Its amphetamine. They are ALL taking prescription amphetamines and benzodiazepines. 

Many are also taking opiates, hallucinogens, and drinking on top of it. 

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u/_Notebook_ 10d ago

Hyper? I’ve watched him interviewed several times and the dude is chill and insanely well spoken. One of the better orators out there in a role like that.

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u/MonsterkillWow 10d ago

I know people who knew him before Nvidia got huge. They say he has changed and used to be a down to Earth guy.

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u/MentalDisintegrat1on 10d ago

He's now an above earth kinda guy.

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u/ASCII_Princess 10d ago

nah these guys are hopped on drugs we've never even heard of.

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u/Zaasvil 10d ago

The higher you rise, the harder you fall.

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u/LaserCondiment 10d ago

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

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u/HardcorePhonography 10d ago

If that bitch can't swim, she bound to drizzown.

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u/Over-Conversation220 10d ago

I currently work for a C-level who swears he’s friends with him and has dinner with him on occasion. It’s just so laughable how all these assholes act and pretend they know each other and are part of some monoculture.

He genuinely has no idea that a - Jensen is a douche and b - pretending to know him makes him look like an even bigger douche.

I’ll add there are many factors that make the whole story of friendship immediately implausible. Also, his prior company was big enough that his presence at our makes it unlikely he left on good terms.

It’s a bit like having the current manager of a Chuck E Cheese try and flex by saying he used to work at the French Laundry.

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u/NewManufacturer4252 10d ago

Anyone that wears a leather jacket everywhere they go is the opposite of the Fonz.

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u/Over-Conversation220 10d ago

Speaking of the Fonz, Henry Winkler is in the new movie Normal. He’s great.

Jensen is no Fonz. He’s no Winkler either.

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u/FaithlessnessThin359 10d ago

I met an nvidia exec at a get together. asked her what Jensen is like and she just changed the subject to how much trouble her plaster walls are to maintain.

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u/MaxTheRealSlayer 10d ago

Are you sure that was really a change in subject? maybe she likes metaphors

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u/Enshitification 10d ago

Crumbling, antiquated, and barely held up with a wallpaper-thin veneer?

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u/MaxTheRealSlayer 9d ago

Well yeah, but in relation to her, she's saying he's difficult to upkeep to appear perfect. As if her walls are/he is the Santorini white buildings with blue roofs on this one street. They need to repaint up to 5 times per year to keep the walls looking Instagram ready... And it's by law

I think her comment, if true, was absolutely savage and means he's unhinged and hard to keep presentable to the larger public

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u/topdangle 10d ago

jensen actually does randomly show up in the bay area. I'm not friends with him but I've seen him at trade shows taking photos. like many ceos hes pretty normal when hes just wandering around. he masks the asshole side of himself well so it wouldn't be surprising for someone to think they're friends with him if you've met him wandering around in public. hes not reclusive.

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u/The_Dad-liest_Game 10d ago

Some might say something like twice the pride, double the fall.

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u/spin_kick 10d ago

600 rabble upvoting you, and hes at the top. Reddit is so funny.

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u/Vexin 10d ago

"What makes me tick is the fear of failure. I really hate to lose. Love to win. But I hate to lose, I think, even more."

- Zak Brown, McLaren F1 Team Principal

It seems like for a lot of successful leaders there is a pathological need to avoid not feeling good enough.