“If the US does not sell cutting-edge semiconductors to China, US big tech companies will lose a huge irreplaceable market (China) and suffer enormous damage, but China will eventually achieve technological independence by producing semiconductors on its own.”
Jensen Huang (Huang Renxun · 黃仁勳) Nvidia CEO ( CEO ) said this in an interview with the British daily Financial Times ( FT ) in May . He strongly criticized the Joe Biden administration’s export restrictions and investment restrictions in the semiconductor sector to China, saying, “It is rather like tying the hands of American companies behind their backs.”
Hwang did not stop at criticizing only verbally. When the export path of Nvidia’s high-end chip ( A100 ) to China was blocked due to government policy , it developed a low-end model ( A800 ) to replace it and sold it to China. Apart from the US government’s position to isolate and exclude China from high-tech industries, Nvidia has explicitly revealed its intentions that it has no intention of giving up the Chinese market.
Foreign media reported Hwang’s actions as “the position of the American business world” looking at the conflict between the US and China. In fact, Elon Musk , CEO of Tesla , and Jamie Dimon, chairman of JP Morgan Stanley, also ordered the US government to improve relations with China one after another, emphasizing Hwang’s voice and highlighting his presence.
Biggest Beneficiary of AI , Founder of GPUHwang is the founder of Nvidia, which is considered the most valuable company in the era of artificial intelligence ( AI ). This year, the 30th anniversary of Nvidia’s founding, it entered the “market capitalization (market capitalization) $ 1 trillion club.” Nvidia is the only semiconductor company in the world whose ransom exceeds $1 trillion.
Nvidia monopolizes 90% of the global graphics processing unit ( GPU ) market . The ‘GeForce 256’ released by Nvidia in 1999 is the world’s first GPU . It was named GPU to mean that it is not a simple graphics card, but a major semiconductor that plays an equal role with the central processing unit ( CPU ) .
With the generative AI craze at the end of last year, the value of GPUs literally skyrocketed. Shares of Nvidia, a de facto monopoly, have soared nearly 300% this year alone. Hwang’s personal wealth also increased tremendously. According to Bloomberg’s billionaire ranking statistics, Hwang’s net worth is $39.2 billion (about 51 trillion won), and his ranking, which was ranked 70th to 80th in the world until the beginning of this year, rose to 34th at once.
Racism at the age of 9 at an American boarding school… “I love those days”Enthusiasm for Nvidia shifted to Hwang, the founder. ‘Leather jacket boss with a trillion-dollar chip company’ (Reuters), ‘New style icon in Silicon Valley’ (New York Times), ‘The man who went from being a bathroom cleaner to a trillion-dollar chip king’ (The Times) Leading media outlets focused on him.
Hwang was born in Tainan, Taiwan in 1963 and is an immigrant who came to the United States via Thailand. His father, a scientist, and his mother, an English teacher, send the nine-year-old Hwang along with his one-year-old brother to the Oneida Baptist Boarding School in Kentucky, USA, when a civil war breaks out in Thailand.
Hwang experiences all sorts of discrimination here. The school had a system of dividing work between students, but because Hwang was Asian, he had to clean the toilet bowl for over three years. In an interview with NPR in 2012 , he suffered from severe school violence to the extent that he said, “The kids all had pocket knives, and they weren’t pretty when they fought.”
Although he had a tough school days, Hwang overcame it with his unique optimistic personality. “The bottom line of this story is that I really loved my time there,” he said. “It was a tough time, but I worked really hard and studied.” In fact, he donated $2 million (about 2.6 billion won) to the school in 2019 for the construction of a female dormitory and classroom building.
Emphasis on self-sacrifice leadership, intellectual honestyHwang received a BS in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984 and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992. At that time, the first Mac computer was released by Apple, and the personal computer era was just unfolding. As an electrical engineering major, he said, “I graduated at the perfect time,” and there were plenty of opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship.
After college, he worked as a director of LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer for AMD . On February 17, 1993, his 30th birthday, at a restaurant in Silicon Valley, Hwang joined forces with fellow engineers Chris Malachowski and Curtis Prim and founded Nvidia, a graphics card development company, in April of that year.
At the time, computer images and graphics were processed through the CPU , and Hwang, who was a computer game fanatic in his childhood, foresaw that “the more the game industry develops, the greater the demand for semiconductors that can process only graphics and images quickly.”
At first, I didn’t even have a mission. Hwang said, “At the time, I attached NV from the first letter of ‘next version ’ to all files , but when I was establishing a corporation, I was looking for a word with two letters N and V, and found the Latin word ‘ Invidia’ (envy).” “That became the name of the company now,” he explained.
Since its founding, Hwang has expanded the business by demonstrating his unique fighting spirit. Reading the market trend, the graphics card, which was ‘for video game consoles’, was converted to ‘for PC games’, and continued to develop GPUs . When the company was on the brink of bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis, he cut his annual salary to $1 and focused on recruiting talent, rather showing leadership of ‘self-sacrifice’ by developing his technology.
The corporate culture of Nvidia that Hwang emphasizes is ‘intellectual honesty’. “We are tolerant of mistakes, but we do not tolerate covering them up,” he said. His management philosophy was also reflected in his speech at the graduation ceremony of National Taiwan University on the 27th of last month. He emphasized to the students that day, “We must have the humility메이저놀이터 to face failure, admit our mistakes, and ask for help.”
CEO of the black jacket’ with wings only … Korea is complicated insideHwang is called the ‘ CEO of the black leather jacket’ because he always wears a black rider jacket at official events . Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant in Silicon Valley, said of Huang’s leather jacket, “It symbolizes Hollywood in the 1950s and evokes independence, open roads, rebelliousness, and sex appeal.” Neatly trimmed white hair, strong eyes beyond the glasses, and the company logo tattooed on his left arm when Nvidia’s stock price broke 100 dollars are also styles that symbolize him.South Korea’s intention to look at Nvidia’s growth as if it has wings is complicated. Huang, a Taiwanese-American, mainly entrusts the GPU foundry (consignment production) of Nvidia, a fabless (semiconductor design company) company, to Taiwan’s TSMC . When US company Intel recently re-entered the foundry, he said, “The possibility of cooperation with Intel is open.” Hwang is also critical of the US government’s regulation of the public. This is why Korea, which competes with TSMC in the foundry field and has to escape China’s pursuit in the high-tech field, is deeply troubled by Nvidia’s ‘overwhelming strength’.