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Jensen & Lori Huang Foundation, 1801 Page Mill Rd Palo Alto, CA 94304-1216 United States, Palo Alto, CA (2026)

01/14/2026

Jensen Huang says relentless negativity around AI is hurting society and has "done a lot of damage"

Ever since ChatGPT was released to the masses, there's been a lot of negativity around generative AI – from the number of jobs its set to make obsolete to more extreme concerns like an apocalyptic event. Nvidia's Jensen Huang isn't happy about it, claiming that this "doomer narrative" is "not helpful to society." It's not an entirely unsurprising view from the CEO of the company whose hardware powers the AI industry.

Huang made his feelings about AI skeptics, haters, and doom-mongers clear on a recent episode of the No Priors podcast.

The boss of the world's most valuable company said "the battle of the narratives" between those who think AI will benefit society and those who believe it will degrade or even destroy it was one of his biggest takeaways from 2025.

Huang did admit that "it's too simplistic" to dismiss either of these views entirely, but he believes some naysayers' views are having a detrimental effect.

"I think we've done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative," Huang said.

"And I appreciate that many of us grew up and enjoyed science fiction, but it's not helpful. It's not helpful to people. It's not helpful to the industry. It's not helpful to society. It's not helpful to the governments."

Huang never named names, but he's spoken out against those who've warned about AI's consequences in the past. Last June, soon after Anthropic leader Dario Amodei said that AI could wipe out about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, leading to unemployment spikes up to 20%, Huang said he "pretty much disagree[d] with almost everything" his fellow CEO said.

Huang appeared to reference Amodei again during the No Priors podcast. He said no company should ask governments for more AI regulation.

"Their intentions are clearly deeply conflicted, and their intentions are clearly not completely in the best interest of society," he said. "I mean, they're obviously CEOs, they're obviously companies, and obviously they're advocating for themselves."

In May 2025, Huang and Amodei clashed over the AI Diffusion Rules that restrict the export of advanced AI technologies to countries such as China.

Anthropic has argued for tighter controls and enforcement, and highlighted some of the unusual cases of people smuggling chips into the Asian nation. Nvidia hit back, stating its chips have never been smuggled into China via the likes of fake pregnant bellies or alongside live lobsters, despite Chinese customs documenting these cases.

Huang also claimed that the amount of negativity surrounding AI could make some skeptics' worst fears a reality.

"When 90% of the messaging is all around the end of the world and the pessimism, and I think we're scaring people from making the investments in AI that makes it safer, more functional, more productive, and more useful to society," he said.

This isn't the first case of a rich executive whose company is hugely invested in the AI industry complaining that people don't love the tech as much as they should.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella recently complained that the conversation around AI needs to move beyond "slop." There was also Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft's AI group, who called public criticism of AI "mind-blowing" in November.

As a reminder, it's now estimated that more than 20% of YouTube's feed can be defined as slop, and the number of people who lose their jobs due to AI or related technologies keeps growing. It's unlikely that the negativity is going to go away because it hurts a few executives' feelings.

01/14/2026

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang 'perfectly fine' with prospect of California billionaire tax

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Bloomberg Television in an interview that California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax does not concern him. The proposal would tax individuals with net worth exceeding $1 billion and is being promoted by labor unions seeking to fund health care and education programs.

“We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes, I guess, they would like to apply, so be it,” Huang said. “I’m perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once.” Huang, 62, leads Nvidia, which is headquartered in Santa Clara, and is estimated to be worth more than $160 billion. His remarks come as multiple Bay Area billionaires have relocated to states with lower tax burdens.

Wealth tax mechanics and timeline: The ballot initiative, authored by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, would impose a one-time 5% tax on individuals with assets exceeding $1 billion. Supporters say the revenue would fund health care, education and food assistance programs. The tax would also apply retroactively to California residents as of Jan. 1 if approved by voters.

Billionaire moves and state response: Several Bay Area billionaires have since moved residences or business operations to Texas and Florida, states without personal income taxes, as the proposal gains traction. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel recently opened a new office in Miami, David Sacks relocated to Austin, and former Google CEO Larry Page has explored reducing his ties to California, according to public reporting. Gavin Newsom has warned that a state-level wealth tax could spur departures, saying at a recent New York Times DealBook Summit, “You can’t isolate yourself from the 49 others.”

01/06/2026

Jensen Huang Shakes Vegas With Nvidia’s Physical A.I. Vision at CES

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is the biggest celebrity in Las Vegas this week. His CES keynote at the Fontainebleau Resort proved harder to get into than any sold-out Vegas shows. Journalists who cleared their schedules for the event waited for hours outside the 3,600-seat BleauLive Theatre. Many who arrived on time—after navigating the sprawling maze of conference venues and, in some cases, flying in from overseas to see the tech king of the moment—were turned away due to overcapacity and redirected to a watch party outside, where some 2,000 attendees gathered in a mix of frustration and reverence.

Shortly after 1 p.m., Huang jogged onto the stage, wearing a glistening, embossed black leather jacket, and wished the crowd a happy New Year. He opened with a brisk history of A.I., tracing the last few years of exponential progress—from the rise of large language models to OpenAI’s advances in reasoning systems and the explosion of so-called agentic A.I. All of it built toward the theme that dominated the bulk of his 90-minute presentation: physical A.I.

Physical A.I. is a concept that has gained momentum among leading researchers over the past year. The goal is to train A.I. systems to understand the intuitive rules humans take for granted—such as gravity, causality, motion and object permanence—so machines can reason about and safely interact with real environments.

Nvidia enters the self-driving race
Huang unveiled Alpamayo, a world foundational model designed to power autonomous driving. He called it “the world’s first reasoning autonomous driving A.I.”

To demonstrate, Nvidia played a one-shot video of a Mercedes vehicle equipped with Alpamayo navigating busy downtown San Francisco traffic. The car executed turns, stopped for lights and vehicles, yielded to pedestrians and changed lanes. A human driver sat behind the wheel throughout the drive but did not intervene.

One particularly interesting thing Huang discussed was how Nvidia trains physical A.I. systems—a fundamentally different challenge from training language models. Large language models learn from text, of which humanity has produced enormous quantities. But how do you teach an A.I. Newton’s second law of motion?

“Where does that data come from?” Huang asked. “Instead of languages—because we created a bunch of text that we consider ground truths that A.I. can learn from—how do we teach an A.I. the ground truths of physics? There are lots and lots of videos, but it’s hardly enough to capture the diversity of interactions we need.”

Nvidia’s answer is synthetic data: information generated by A.I. systems based on samples of real-world data. In the case of Alpamayo, another Nvidia world model—called Cosmos—uses limited real-world inputs to generate far more complex, physically plausible videos. A basic traffic scenario becomes a series of realistic camera views of cars interacting on crowded streets. A still image of a robot and vegetables turns into a dynamic kitchen scene. Even a text prompt can be transformed into a video with physically accurate motion.

Nvidia said the first fleet of Alpamayo-powered robotaxis, built in the 2025 Mercedes-Benz CLA vehicles, is slated to launch in the U.S. in the first quarter, followed by Europe in the second quarter and Asia later in 2026.

For now, Alpamayo remains a Level 2 autonomous driving system—similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving—which requires a human driver to remain attentive behind the wheel at all times. Nvidia’s longer-term goal is Level 4 autonomy, where vehicles can operate without human supervision in specific, constrained environments. That’s one step below full autonomy, or Level 5.

“The ChatGPT moment for physical A.I. is nearly here,” Huang said in a voiceover accompanying one of the videos shown during the keynote.

01/06/2026

Nvidia announces new, more powerful Vera Rubin chip made for AI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday that the company’s next generation of chips is in “full production” saying they can deliver five times the artificial-intelligence computing of the company’s previous chips when serving up chatbots and other AI apps.

In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the leader of the world’s most valuable company revealed new details about its chips, which will arrive later this year and which Nvidia executives are in the company’s labs being tested by AI firms, as Nvidia faces increasing competition from rivals as well as its own customers.

The Vera Rubin platform, made up of six separate Nvidia chips, is expected to debut later this year, with the flagship server containing 72 of the company’s graphics units and 36 of its new central processors.

Huang showed how they can be strung together into “pods” with more than 1,000 Rubin chips and said they could improve the efficiency of generating what are known as “tokens” – the fundamental unit of AI systems – by 10 times.

To get the new performance results, however, Huang said the Rubin chips use a proprietary kind of data that the company hopes the wider industry will adopt.

“This is how we were able to deliver such a gigantic step up in performance, even though we only have 1.6 times the number of transistors,” Huang said.

While Nvidia still dominates the market for training AI models, it faces far more competition – from traditional rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices as well as customers like Alphabet’s Google – in delivering the fruits of those models to hundreds of millions of users of chatbots and other technologies.

Much of Huang’s speech focused on how well the new chips would work for that task, including adding a new layer of storage technology called “context memory storage” aimed at helping chatbots provide snappier responses to long questions and conversations.

Nvidia also touted a new generation of networking switches with a new kind of connection called co-packaged optics. The technology, which is key to linking together thousands of machines into one, competes with offerings from Broadcom and Cisco Systems.

In other announcements, Huang highlighted new software that can help self-driving cars make decisions about which path to take – and leave a paper trail for engineers to use afterward. Nvidia showed research about software, called Alpamayo, late last year, with Huang saying on Monday it would be released more widely, along with the data used to train it so that automakers can make evaluations.

“Not only do we open-source the models, we also open-source the data that we use to train those models, because only in that way can you truly trust how the models came to be,” Huang said from a stage in Las Vegas. Last month, Nvidia scooped up talent and chip technology from startup Groq, including executives who were instrumental in helping Alphabet’s Google design its own AI chips.

While Google is a major Nvidia customer, its own chips have emerged as one of Nvidia’s biggest threats as Google works closely with Meta Platforms and others to chip away at the company’s lead.

During a question-and-answer session with financial analysts after his speech, Huang said the Groq deal “won’t affect our core business” but could result in new products that expand its lineup. At the same time, Nvidia is eager to show that its latest products can outperform older chips like the H200, which Donald Trump has allowed to flow to China.

The chip, which was the predecessor to Nvidia’s current “Blackwell” chip, is in high demand in China, which has alarmed China hawks across the US political spectrum.

01/02/2026

CES is now a major player in artificial intelligence — thanks to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

In past years, CES in Las Vegas has highlighted such groundbreaking technologies as electric salt spoons and Tasers that double as MP3 players.
But, increasingly, the annual event is moving beyond gimmicky inventions to be a major player in the world of artificial intelligence.

It will kick off on January 5 with a speech from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that sources say will describe a roadmap for how Nvidia’s full stack will drive the next industrial revolution — accelerating both generative AI and physical AI.

“The Jensen keynote speech is front and center in terms of strategic direction for AI,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told me.

“It’s not just everyone in tech and markets watching, but everyone around the world.”

He added, “This kicks off the consumer AI revolution. AI technology is coming to consumers globally this year.”

Huang has been attending CES on and off for nearly a quarter century. Last year, he also gave the keynote.

Artificial intelligence investment made up as much as 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2024, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. CES will have an outsized impact this year.

Lisa Su — the CEO of semiconductor designer and developer company AMD — will also keynote. She’s transformed AMD from a struggling chipmaker into a serious Nvidia competitor with a market cap exceeding $200 billion.

While AMD holds just a fraction of Nvidia’s market share in AI accelerators, Su is expected to announce new chips aimed at enterprises looking for alternatives to Nvidia’s premium-priced GPUs.

While chips get much of the attention, Huang will emphasize physical AI in his keynote, highlighting how that can extend far beyond robotics to be used in everything from drones to refrigerators.

“Think of it as industries,” one source said. “Healthcare, automotive, manufacturing — Jensen is showing how AI transforms how these sectors actually work.”

To be sure, anything Huang and Nvidia do has outsized economic impact. The company’s market cap is currently $4.6 trillion, nearly exceeding the entire economy of Germany.

With AI-related spending expected to hit $3 to $4 trillion over the next three years, what Huang announces about data centers, physical AI, and robotics won’t just move markets; it will shape how those trillions get allocated.

While the US seems to be a clear leader in artificial intelligence this year, Chinese companies are expected to be well-represented, too.

The show floor will reflect the shift to physical AI. Hyundai will highlight humanoid robots, Boston Dynamics will demo its latest autonomous systems, and Samsung is unveiling an “AI living ecosystem” that includes refrigerators capable of tracking inventory and anticipating grocery needs. LG, Intel, AMD, and Lenovo are all positioning their hardware as the foundation enabling AI to move from data centers to actual devices in consumers’ homes.

For years, CES showcased technology of tomorrow that often never arrived. This year is about technology that’s already here — and the question is no longer whether AI will transform consumer products, but how quickly.

01/02/2026

Nvidia reportedly invests $30 billion to acquire Israeli company AI21, targeting AI professionals.

Chip giant NVIDIA is reportedly in deep talks with Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) startup AI21 Labs, and may acquire it for up to $30 billion, further expanding its presence in Israel.

According to the Israeli financial news outlet Calcalist, AI21 has been seeking a buyer for a long time, and negotiations with Nvidia have made significant progress in recent weeks. The report indicates that Nvidia is interested in AI21's 200 employees, most of whom are highly educated and possess "rare expertise in AI development."

Founded in 2017 by Amnon Shashua and two other co-founders, AI21 is one of the startups that has benefited from the AI boom in recent years and attracted significant attention from venture capitalists and institutional investors.

Shashua is also the founder and CEO of Mobileye, an autonomous driving technology company.

If the acquisition goes through, it will be a success for Nvidia's presence in Israel.

CEO Jensen Huang has stated on several occasions that Israel is Nvidia's "second home," and the company is also planning to build a research and development center in Kiryat Tivon, south of Haifa, that can accommodate up to 10,000 employees. The design concept will be inspired by the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, California.

According to the plan, the new park will start construction in 2027 and welcome its first residents in 2031.

01/02/2026

Nvidia takes $5B in Intel shares as major financial lifeline for chipmaker

Nvidia has purchased Intel shares worth $5 billion, the American semiconductor firm said in a filing on Monday, carrying out a transaction announced in September.

The leading AI chip designer said in September it would pay $23.28 per share for Intel common stock, in a deal that is seen as a major financial lifeline for the chipmaker after years of missteps and capital intensive production capacity expansions drained its finances.

The world’s most valuable firm has bought over 214.7 million Intel shares at the price set out in the September agreement, in a private placement, according to Monday’s filing.

U.S. antitrust agencies had cleared Nvidia’s investment in Intel, according to a notice posted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier this month.

Nvidia shares were down 1.8% in trading, while Intel stock was 0.4% higher.

12/26/2025

Nvidia dominated the headlines in 2025 — these were its 15 biggest events of the year

It’s difficult to think of any single company that had a bigger impact on Wall Street and the AI trade in 2025 than Nvidia (NVDA).

Investors scrutinized CEO Jensen Huang’s every move, whether that was his meetings with President Trump or a night out with the heads of Samsung and Hyundai for fried chicken and beer.

Nvidia’s revenue soared in 2025, bringing in $187.1 billion, and its market capitalization continued to climb, briefly eclipsing the $5 trillion mark before settling back in the $4 trillion range.

There were plenty of major highs and deep lows throughout the year, but these 15 were among the biggest moments of Nvidia’s 2025.

Jan. 6: CES 2025
Nvidia rang in the new year with a series of product announcements ranging from a new pint-sized AI chip to more powerful gaming cards at CES 2025. Huang’s keynote touched on an array of topics, including physical AI, otherwise known as robots; desktop-based AI systems; and a litany of AI software updates that set the stage for the company’s 2025.

Jan. 27: The DeepSeek moment
Nvidia had an incredible year by seemingly every measure, but it started out with a shock. In January, DeepSeek released its R-1 model, which the company claimed it trained using less than state-of-the-art processors. That sent the AI trade into a meltdown, with the company shedding nearly $600 billion from its market cap in a single day.

Despite the initial blowup, fears that AI companies would no longer need high-powered chips seem to have been overblown. That’s because training AI models and running them are two different operations, and according to Nvidia, running models with more powerful chips improves overall performance.

Markets eventually settled down as more companies agreed with the assumption, but Nvidia’s stock price didn’t return to pre-DeepSeek levels until June.

March 18: Nvidia reveals Blackwell Ultra chips at GTC
Nvidia’s annual GTC event, held in San Jose, used to be a moderately sized tech conference. But this year’s GTC was far different. Huang’s keynote filled the SAP Center, home of the San Jose Sharks hockey team, and Nvidia took over a large swath of downtown San Jose, which included an enormous collection of food tents and stalls that covered the 2.3-acre Plaza de César Chávez.

During his speech, Huang debuted Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chip, the successor to its Blackwell GPU, and the GB300 superchip, which combined two Blackwell GPUs and one of Nvidia’s Grace CPUs.

The CEO said the offerings were built for the age of “AI reasoning” and said models like DeepSeek’s R-1 would run far better on Nvidia’s latest and greatest.

April 2: 'Liberation Day'
Trump’s decision to implement a series of tariffs on countries and goods on April 2, which he called “Liberation Day,” sent the stock market into such a nosedive that the president had no choice but to walk some of them back just a week later.

Nvidia wasn’t immune to the drop. The company saw its stock price decline from $110 on April 2 to $94.31 on April 4. Shares returned to pre-"Liberation Day" numbers by April 9, but continued to waffle until breaking out of their slump on April 25.

April 15: H20 effectively banned
Nvidia’s April didn’t get much better when the Trump administration implemented new chip restrictions that called for Nvidia to receive a license to ship the H20 chip to China, effectively banning sales of the processor to the country.

Nvidia designed the GPU to meet restrictions set up during President Joe Biden’s administration. Trump, however, blocked the China-specific chip on security grounds. The company ended up writing down $4.5 billion in charges related to the H20 in Q1 and took an additional $4 billion in Q2.

July 9: Nvidia hits $4 trillion
Despite taking a hit from the DeepSeek meltdown and Trump’s China ban, Nvidia stock continued to perform, and in July the company became the first to see its market capitalization pass the $4 trillion mark.

Nvidia topped $1 trillion in 2023 and took just three years to add another $3 trillion, thanks to its leadership position in the AI chip market.

July 14: Nvidia can sell H20 in China again
In July, the on-again-off-again relationship between Washington and China was back on, with Nvidia announcing that the Trump administration had assured the company that it would allow sales of H20 chips to China.

Huang successfully made the case that America would benefit from selling its technologies to China and risked falling behind if it completely cut itself off from the market, convincing Trump to allow Nvidia to sell to the country again.

Aug. 11: Nvidia to pay 15% cut on China sales
Although the White House assured Nvidia it would approve the sale of its chips to China, the administration later announced that it would take a 15% cut of the sales. The same rule applied to Nvidia rival AMD (AMD).

Despite the potential revenue haircut, investors on Wall Street weren’t too bothered by the announcement, figuring that 85% of the revenue from sales to the country was better than the 0% Nvidia was bringing in before.

Sept. 22: Nvidia says it will invest $100 billion in OpenAI
In September, Nvidia announced it would invest upward of $100 billion in ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The partnership would let OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) build out 10 gigawatts or more of data center capacity, allowing it to train and run its GPT models.

Nvidia’s deals have raised eyebrows among analysts who warn that such circular investments, where a company (Nvidia) invests in a customer (OpenAI) and uses that cash to purchase chips from the investor (Nvidia), artificially boost AI spending.

Nvidia has faced criticism for a similar deal with CoreWeave (CRWV). Nvidia invested in the company, which then turned around and bought Nvidia chips. Such deals have driven at least part of the discussion around an AI bubble.

Oct. 17: Nvidia’s first Blackwell chip built in US
The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, has made reshoring chip manufacturing a national imperative. And while Nvidia doesn’t build its own chips — it outsources that to TSMC — it did celebrate that company’s completion of the first Blackwell chip built in the US in October.

Oct. 29: Nvidia hits $5 trillion
Nvidia’s market capitalization hit $5 trillion in late October, just a few months after crossing the $4 trillion mark.

The exuberance came as the company announced a number of new deals with companies like Uber at its first GTC event in Washington, D.C. It also followed word that Huang would meet with Trump in South Korea ahead of the president’s meeting with Xi Jinping to discuss a trade deal.

The hope was that Trump and Xi would reach an agreement to allow Nvidia to sell its chips in the country, but a deal never materialized.

Oct. 30: Viral fried chicken photo with leaders of Samsung and Hyundai
Huang’s star exploded throughout 2025, so much so that in October, reporters and onlookers swarmed a South Korean fried chicken restaurant to catch a glimpse of him dining with the heads of Samsung and Hyundai. An image of the trio subsequently went viral.

Nov. 19: Nvidia to ship chips to the Middle East
Nvidia received authorization to ship the equivalent of more than 60,000 Blackwell chips to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in November as the company continued to vie for the opportunity to sell its processors to a wider array of countries.

The company has pushed the concept of sovereign AI throughout 2025, saying that it allows countries around the world to get access to their own AI data centers without having to rely on other nations.

But China hawks said the move could give the US adversary access to Nvidia chips, due to that country’s close relationship with the UAE.

Nov. 25: Nvidia’s Google tweet
Nvidia has faced threats from its own customers, including Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN), building their own chips to power their AI platforms, but in November, a report that Google could provide Meta (META) with its own tensor processing units (TPUs) for the social media giant’s data centers seemed to spook Nvidia.

The company sent out a viral tweet in response to the story, congratulating Google on its chips’ performance, but pointed out that its own GPUs were a generation ahead of Google’s and noted that it’s the only chip that can run all AI models.

Dec. 9.: Nvidia H200 approved for China
After a year of will he, won’t he, Trump wrote in a post on the Truth Social platform that he was greenlighting the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China. The H200 is two generations behind Nvidia’s current Blackwell Ultra processors.

Trump said that Xi responded positively to the deal, which, if fully approved by the countries, could provide a boost to Nvidia’s bottom line.

Still, there’s no guarantee that the arrangement won’t fall apart. Nvidia has become a negotiating chip for the two countries, just as Apple was before, and could see its chips banned again.

12/26/2025

Nvidia is said to buy AI chip startup Groq for $20 bn in biggest acquisition yet

Nvidia Corp. is said to have agreed to buy AI chip startup Groq for $20 billion cash, in what is potentially its biggest acquisition till date.

Groq is expected to alert its investors about the Nvidia deal later in the day, CNBC reported on Wednesday, citing Disruptive CEO Alex Davis who said “the deal came together quickly”. His company led Groq's latest funding round that more than doubled its valuation to $6.9 billion.

The acquisition includes all of Groq's assets, but its nascent cloud business is not part of the deal.

Founded in 2016, Groq designs AI inference chips to optimise pre-trained large language models. Its Founder CEO Jonathan Ross was one of the creators of Google's tensor processing unit—a custom AI chip seen as an alternative to Nvidia's pricier graphics processing units.

In September 2025, Groq raised $750 million from investors including Disruptive, Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr is partner.

The investment more than doubled the Mountain View, California-based company's valuation to $6.9 billion from $2.8 billion in August 2024.

12/15/2025

Jensen Huang Says Nvidia Once Faced A Moment It Could 'Vaporize Overnight' Had A Client Not Taken A $5 Million Leap Of Faith

Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang says his company once came so close to running out of cash that it could "vaporize overnight," and survived only because a Sega executive gambled $5 million on a failing chip project.

On an episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," which aired recently, Huang recalled flying to Japan in the mid-1990s to tell Sega boss Shoichiro Irimajiri that Nvidia couldn't deliver the promised graphics chip for the Dreamcast console.

"First, the technology that we promised you doesn't work," he said he told Irimajiri. "Second, we shouldn't finish your contract because we'd waste all your money and you would have something that doesn't work. And I recommend you find another partner to build your game console."

$5 Million Bet That Saved Nvidia
Huang then made an audacious plea. He said he warned Irimajiri that without more cash "we'd be dead. We would have vaporized instantly," and asked Sega to convert the last $5 million payment on the contract into an equity investment instead.

He told Rogan he admitted to Irimajiri that "it is most likely to be lost," but argued that without the money Nvidia would "be out of business and we would have no chance." Irimajiri took a few days and came back with a simple answer, saying, "We'll do it."

That lifeline gave Nvidia time to pivot away from its troubled NV1 chip and build the RIVA 128, a 1997 graphics processor that finally put the company on the map in PC gaming.

A Turn In Eventual Fortunes
Sega later sold its Nvidia stake for about $15 million after the chipmaker went public in 1999, a decision Huang noted would be worth roughly $1 trillion today if the shares had been held, given Nvidia's multi-trillion-dollar valuation in the AI boom.

While Sega quit the console business after the Dreamcast's 2001 failure and reinvented itself as a third-party publisher, Nvidia has become the dominant supplier of GPUs powering modern artificial intelligence projects worldwide.

NVDA stock currently scores high on Momentum, Growth and Quality in Benzinga's Edge Stock Rankings, with a favorable price trend in the long term.

Jensen & Lori Huang Foundation

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