Source: Alphabet List

When he was 8 years old, Huang Renxun jumped into the sea of ​​fire.

That was when he poured gasoline into the swimming pool, lit it, and jumped in. Oil is lighter than water. There is already a flame on the water surface, but it is still quiet under the water.

Many years later, Huang Renxun recalled the feeling of looking up at the fire under the water, and he was still unsatisfied: "It's so beautiful..."

This is not only a memory fragment from his childhood. The coexistence of water and fire, watching fire in water, has almost become a metaphor for Huang Renxun's life.

Fifty years later, the fire of AI has ignited the world, and controversies are happening every day.

Musk couldn’t stand Ultraman and took OpenAI to court again and again, describing him as “demon”.

Zuckerberg was very worried about Apple. While he led Meta to attack the large open source model, he criticized Apple's closedness. When the "love" became intense, he rarely used swear words on the stage.

It’s not peaceful either. The recent incident of Zhu Xiaohu's bombardment of Zhang Yutong in Dark Side of the Moon is still fermenting. In the circle of friends, Zhu Xiaohu angrily said that he would not tolerate "violation of fiduciary responsibilities" and "violation of business ethics and even the law." The language was not unreasonable.

Amidst all the disturbances, Huang Renxun seems like a complete old "good guy".

He shared the stage with Masayoshi Son, uncovering the scars of the past, and mentioned that Masayoshi Son was once the largest shareholder of Nvidia, but the atmosphere was quite relaxed. Although SoftBank sold all Nvidia shares that year, it was a heavy blow at the bottom.

He shared the stage with Zuckerberg. The latter got emotional when talking about Apple, but he made fun of it and did not answer the question. Although Nvidia and Apple have many grievances.

He and Musk started a boasting mode. He praised Musk as a "superman", and Musk praised him on X every now and then. Although no one will forget that Tesla’s self-developed chips stabbed Nvidia in the back a few years ago.

Not to mention his relationship with Taiwanese chip manufacturers. Chip production capacity was tight. Huang Renxun went to Taiwan several times and was photographed buying pineapples in Hokkien. In addition, Huang Renxun also appeared in Hong Kong at the end of last month. In a group photo circulated on the Internet, Huang Renxun and a group of key figures raised a beer glass at a food stall in Sham Shui Po.

Look at the fire in the water and it will not burn even a cent.

Huang Renxun is now the winner, and of course he does not need to be in a hurry with anyone. In the years when cores were hard to find, technology giants tried hard to build a good relationship with him.

But looking back, it is not difficult to find that even when Huang Renxun was not at the top, even in fierce battles, even if there was a chance of a misfire, he almost never really gave himself a chance. Get into personal vendettas. He is very good at keeping things under wraps and talking about things as they happen.

This gives him two personalities at the same time: On the one hand, Huang Renxun's "aggressiveness" is obvious to all, and he is even called "the most willful Party B". The most exaggerated thing is that in 2002, he was unwilling to lower prices. Litigation with Party A, Microsoft. On the other hand, he is either cool and collected in the public eye, either joking with a smile, or otherwise doing his job, but he can't be seen to be anxious.

Such traits are not uncommon in professional managers, such as current Apple CEO Cook or Microsoft CEO Nadella. But it is rare for a founder. The closest person in the technology world is probably Lei Jun.

Aggressive and "good guy", two personalities are intertwined in Huang Renxun. The reason why the word "good guy" needs to be enclosed in double quotation marks is because behind the image of a "good guy" is actually a ruthlessness that is not swayed by emotions.

Huang Renxun had an experience when he was a child, which is often talked about:

When he was about 9 years old, Huang Renxun was sent to the United States by his parents, but something went wrong. He was placed in a special school. There are many problem students in the school. My roommate is 17 years old. When he takes off his clothes, you can see many scars from stabbings.

Huang Renxun is not only the youngest, but also the only Chinese (or Asian). But he studies well, and problem students also need to read and recognize words. So Huang Renxun helped others with their homework, and his roommates took good care of him, so no one provoked him anymore.

Neither becoming "them" nor wandering on the periphery, Huang Jen-Hsun integrated into the new environment in a special way. There are still some behaviors that seem to be closer to each other on the surface, such as learning to smoke. Other than that, he is still the child who studies hard. In the past, the outside world always described Huang Renxun's growth experience as "a young gangster in a hot-blooded college", which is inaccurate.

Blending in like a chameleon has become one of Huang Jen-Hsun’s superpowers.

In 2013, Huang Renxun and Lei Jun shared the stage at the Beijing Convention Center. Huang Renxun stood next to Lei Jun and shouted in Chinese: "I am also a rice fan!"

At that time, Nvidia had entered the mobile market with its Tegra series of chips for several years, but after competing with Qualcomm , MediaTek, and Intel have always been at a disadvantage in the competition.

Huang Renxun not only wanted to conquer the mobile market, but also wanted to further develop the situation in the mobile phone market, so Huang Renxun focused on Xiaomi, which had only been established for three years and was rising like a dark horse. That year, Xiaomi's valuation had reached tens of billions of dollars, higher than Nvidia's market value.

Beijing, Xiaomi, Lei Jun, Huang Renxun ran on stage and said "Hello everyone" and "I am also a rice fan". At that time when Xiaomi represented the feelings of enthusiasts, it immediately ignited the enthusiasm of the audience. In fact, during the few minutes of promotion, Huang Renxun spoke broken Chinese throughout the whole process, and occasionally hugged Lei Jun, who was 6 years younger than him. The audience was very supportive. When Huang Renxun said "the best GPU", someone in the audience shouted "There is no one".

In fact, the cooperation between Xiaomi and Nvidia did not last long. The market response to Tegra 4 was lackluster, and Nvidia's market share in mobile devices further shrunk. Huang Renxun chose to retreat and announced in 2014 that it would no longer focus on the mobile phone market.

But Huang Renxun and Lei Jun were on the same stage, helpingNVIDIA opened up the minds of consumers in the market, and also allowed Huang Renxun to discover the secret of cooperation with local companies. In the following years, Huang Renxun led Nvidia to cooperate with giants such as Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba in cloud computing, autonomous driving and other fields, and deepen its layout in the market.

There are many more famous scenes like this.

Also in 2024, we can see a variety of Huang Renxun:

When the NVIDIA press conference was held in the United States, Huang Renxun spoke fluent English throughout the process and elaborated on the technology. detail. Behind the scenes is Wall Street's glaring gaze.

When attending the NVIDIA district annual meeting, Huang Renxun put on a Northeastern flower jacket and danced on the stage with a red handkerchief. Behind the scenes, it is the U.S. chip ban that has blocked Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips from entering China.

When he went to Hong Kong, Huang Renxun drank beer with everyone at a food stall; when he went to Taiwan, he was photographed buying pineapples in Hokkien. Even when he and Leung met on the same stage in Taiwan, they had to perform in Hokkien. A skit promoting chips. Behind the scenes are Huang Jen-Hsun’s strong binding relationship with Taiwanese chip manufacturers, and the production capacity stuck when the supply of chips exceeds demand.

It’s not an exaggeration to give Huang Renxun the saying “He can go to the hall, he can go to the kitchen”.

Huang Renxun has also been on the verge of a misfire, but he is good at two things: keeping things under wraps and discussing matters as they are, and preventing friction from fermenting in the public opinion arena.

After the setback in his attack on the mobile market, Huang Renxun turned around and announced his withdrawal in 2014. Later, he set his sights on the autonomous vehicle industry.

No need to guess, Huang Renxun will inevitably get close to Musk at this time. The two people interacted more and more. At Nvidia's annual GTC conference in 2015, Huang Renxun invited Musk to the stage and had a conversation for nearly half an hour.

In 2017, Tesla’s Model 3 began to be delivered. Model 3, as well as the previous generation Model S and Model X, were all equipped with Nvidia Drive PX2 chips.

Musk and Huang Renxun ushered in the honeymoon period. Also in 2016, when OpenAI was founded, NVIDIA gave a big gift, the first supercomputer DGX-1 equipped with 8 GPUs. To show his sincerity, Huang Renxun personally delivered this supercomputer to the OpenAI office and wrote his blessings on the case. Afterwards, everyone present signed on the chassis, including Musk and technical backbones, as well as OpenAI interns.

However, this honeymoon period ended when Tesla announced its self-developed chips in 2018.

Musk not only claimed that the Tesla chip is a "self-developed chip for fully autonomous driving" and "the best in the world", but also compared it with Nvidia's Drive Xavier chip, which performs at 144 times per second. trillion times, crushing the latter's 30 trillion operations per second.

This was the moment when Huang Renxun was severely "stabbed in the back", and it was also a point where the gun went off the rails infinitely.

But he chose to deal with it coldly and not directly confront Musk. Nvidia issued a statement in the name of the company in response to the matter. The title was "Tesla raises the bar for self-driving car manufacturers." It first expressed congratulations and praise, and then said that there were "some inaccuracies" in Tesla's statement. "Needs correction."

The statement stated that it is meaningless to compare the performance of Tesla's dual-chip autopilot computer with NVIDIA's single-chip driver assistance system. If you want to compare, it should be compared with NVIDIA's Drive AGX Pegasus computer, whose running speed That's 320 trillion times per second.

Seeing Huang Renxun's restrained statement, Musk also "just gave up".

Later, in Tesla’s second fiscal quarter earnings conference call that year, faced with questions from analysts, Huang Renxun stated that if Tesla’s self-developed chip project fails in the future, Nvidia “ Happy" to help. Musk responded politely on Twitter, praising "NVIDIA has developed great hardware. I respect NVIDIA and Jen-Hsun Huang very much." skilled. In 2017, Google published a paper on the details of TPU, saying that "TPU processing speed is 15 to 30 times faster than current GPUs and CPUs."

In this regard, Huang Renxun chose to write an article himself, expand the comparative data, and attach a performance comparison chart. His attitude was strong, but he quickly calmed down the controversy.

The same moment when the gun almost went off also happened between Huang Renxun and Zhang Zhongmou.

Just last week, on November 29, the second volume of the autobiography of TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou was officially published. It talks about the TSMC 40nm chip crisis.

In 2008, TSMC started producing 40nm process and quickly locked in major customers such as NVIDIA and AMD. But more than a year after it was put into production, TSMC's 40nm chips are in trouble with low yield rates. According to the normal progress, the yield rate of more than 90% should be achieved about one year after the new process is put into production to meet the supply requirements. However, this time the yield rate of 40nm is only about 50%.

In 2009, Zhang Zhongmou was reinstated as CEO of TSMC. During the phone call, Huang Renxun emphasized that this unresolved case needed to be resolved urgently. Zhang Zhongmou then rushed to Huang Renxun's home. After having a casual "pizza dinner" with Huang Renxun and his family, the two started communicating. Zhang Zhongmou proposed a settlement proposal of hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, and Huang Renxun agreed. Within 48 hours, the crisis was resolved.

Under Zhang Zhongmou’s compensation, Huang Renxun still firmly chose TSMC’s 40nm process and laid the foundation for future cooperation on the 28nm process.

The calm discussion and perseverance in the crisis deepened the revolutionary friendship between the two - perhaps Huang Renxun will not forget that in the initial stage of Nvidia, he contacted many chip manufacturers but no one was willing to take the order. , and Zhang Zhongmou personally had a phone call with him, and thus established a cooperative relationship.

Zhang Zhongmou even proposed to Huang Renxun that he take over TSMC and become CEO. In the new book, Zhang Zhongmou revealed that he proposed twice and Huang Renxun rejected it twice. When Huang Renxun rejected Zhang Zhongmou, TSMC’s market value was nearly ten times that of Nvidia.

On the basis of maintaining a decent relationship network in the past, when Nvidia stands on top of the world, those sweet words will not seem too abrupt.

AI is booming, and NVIDIA has become the leader. For Tesla and the newly founded xAI, Musk had dinner with Huang Renxun and begged to sell more GPUs to himself. Huang Renxun actually did it.

In September this year, Musk announced that Colossus, a supercomputing cluster containing 100,000 Nvidia H100s, has been officially launched, ranking first in the world in terms of scale. It only took Musk 122 days to build this supercomputer.

As a result, Huang Renxun and Musk entered the honeymoon period for the second time. Huang Renxun called Colossus a "miracle." Recently, Huang Renxun praised Musk as a "superman", and Musk continued to praise Huang Renxun.

Musk's "miracle" has become Huang Renxun's golden signature for selling AI chips. After praising Musk, Huang Renxun always adds a few words about the AI ​​era and the popularity of the next generation Blackwell GPU. The latest news shows that Musk’s xAI has placed a GB200 order worth US$1.08 billion to Nvidia.

At the 2024 NVIDIA Japan Summit in November, Sun Zhengyi was invited to the stage. Huang Renxun suddenly mentioned: "Mr. Masa, can you imagine what would happen if you became Nvidia's largest shareholder?" When Sun Zhengyi heard this, he hugged Huang Renxun and pretended to cry - the embarrassment of the past, that's it. Resolved easily.

In 2017, SoftBank’s Vision Fund acquired 4.9% of Nvidia’s shares and became the fourth largest shareholder. In February 2019, SoftBank sold off all Nvidia shares due to pressure from the Vision Fund itself and Nvidia's uncertain future due to the decline in cryptocurrency. This move was undoubtedly a heavy blow to Nvidia, which was in deep trouble at the time.

Sun Zhengyi and Huang Renxun have always maintained a good relationship. Later, Sun Zhengyi proposed to lend money to Huang Renxun to privatize Nvidia. After SoftBank acquired Arm, Masayoshi Son also tried to sell it to Jen-Hsun Huang, but ultimately failed due to antitrust pressure.

This past incident seemed embarrassing whether it was mentioned or not, but Huang Renxun took it to the stage and deconstructed it with humor in front of everyone, giving Son a perfect step.

Behind the smile of "good guy" Huang Renxun, there is no flattery undertone, but a sober ruthlessness.

Huang Renxun is not temperamental. Although he does not engage in public opinion wars, he is not soft on litigation.

In addition to the lawsuit with Microsoft, a typical incident is the head-on confrontation with Intel. Intel sued Nvidia in 2009, saying that the mutually authorized patent cross-licensing agreement reached by the two five years ago does not apply to Intel's next-generation integrated memory controller. In other words, after the cooperation, Intel will abandon Nvidia.

At that time, Huang Renxun sued Intel backhand, and his attitude was firm. Not only did he point out that Intel's actual purpose was to hinder GPU technology, but in the interview, Huang Renxun claimed that he would "never reconcile." In the end, the lawsuit was settled on the condition that Intel paid $1.5 billion in patent royalties to Nvidia within five years, and Huang Renxun won a great victory.

But Jen-Hsun Huang does not do such things as being addicted to talking.

At the SIGGRAPH conference in July this year, Huang Renxun and Zuckerberg talked on the same stage. During this period, Zuckerberg talked about Apple and became emotional for a time: "When it comes to Apple closing source, I get angry!" Then, perhaps getting more and more angry as he talked, Zuckerberg even used a rare swear word.

The relationship between Huang Renxun and Apple is not without grudges.

Apple computers used NVIDIA GPUs in the early days, but the NVIDIA "graphics card gate" incident occurred in 2008. The graphics card overheated and caused machine failure, which directly caused losses to partners including Apple. Afterwards, Apple's trust in Nvidia decreased, and when Nvidia was eyeing the mobile phone market, it chose to develop its own chips. And in 2016, Nvidia GPUs were completely discontinued.

By 2019, NVIDIA announced that CUDA would no longer support the MacOS operating system. Since then, Apple and Nvidia have entered into a long-term cold war, which is even called the "chip cold war" between the two.

When the time comes to 2024, the two companies are still competing in the AI ​​arms race. While everyone is rushing to grab Nvidia chips, Apple relies on Amazon's proprietary chips.

However, in the face of Zuckerberg’s criticism of Apple on the stage, Huang Renxun did not respond. Instead, he joked that "it's still live now" and then moved the topic away from Apple. There was neither refutation nor agreement, just silence.

He knows very well that there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies in the business world, so he has no motive and who is really "top".

Perhaps based on this, Huang Renxun can understand the decision of Sun Zhengyi and Musk to abandon themselves at a certain point, and can also resist not opening fire on Apple.

And his allies naturally know it well: behind the "good guy" Huang Renxun, the relationship is dynamic.

In Zhang Zhongmou’s new book, he recalled the past and praised his friendship with Huang Renxun. Huang Renxun is also sending signals to the outside world that he is considering more partners. When attending an event held by Goldman Sachs in San Francisco in September this year, Huang Renxun said: "NVIDIA relies heavily on TSMC to produce the company's important chips, mainly because TSMC's technology is far ahead in the field of wafer manufacturing. If necessary, NVIDIA can still make it Other options.”

In other words, Huang Renxun admitted that there is a possibility of replacing TSMC.

Huang Renxun doesn’t believe itAlways light and always happy is the best. He has an almost cult of torture and suffering, often preaching that he tells himself every day that the company will go bankrupt in 30 days.

When technology giants were laying off employees one after another, he promised not to lay off employees. However, when talking about management, he said that he "doesn't think the best jobs are jobs that always bring happiness" and frankly said that he likes to "torture" employees. , to enhance their abilities.

Perhaps the same is true for Huang Renxun's relationship. The relationship that is always good to everyone is not worthy of praise. It is between you coming and me, and mutual benefit while torturing each other, that is endlessly memorable. of.

The "good guy" Jen-Hsun Huang continues to torment temporary enemies and temporary allies with his smile and uncertainty. Watching fire in the water feels so comfortable.

Reference materials:

1. Silicon Valley 101: "NVIDIA GPU Rising Amidst Lawsuits and Infamy: It Never Stops Fighting, and There Are No Forever Friends"

3. Alphabet List: "Musk Chases Trillion OpenAI"

4. Entrepreneur Magazine: "Huang Renxun: I don’t like layoffs, I would rather "torture" them