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Luxury giant LVMH Group's President and CEO, the godfather of the luxury world and the Napoleon of the boutique industry, Bernard Arnault, achieved a net worth of $17 billion in 2023, outpacing his wealth growth is the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang.

Over the past 12 months, NVIDIA has invested in "more than twenty" companies, with the number of deals being six times that of the previous year. The investment targets include main competitors of OpenAI and startups ranging from healthcare to energy. In 2023, NVIDIA is the hot topic that's red-hot.

01

Securing Key Asian Hubs

In 2023, Jen-Hsun Huang visited Asia, including Taiwan, India, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, meeting with political figures, entrepreneurs, and scientists to broadly lay out collaborations centered around artificial intelligence.

On December 10th local time, the Vietnamese government website posted an article stating that Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh met with Jen-Hsun Huang that day. Huang expressed that NVIDIA "considers Vietnam as its home," and the company wishes to establish a semiconductor base in Vietnam due to its significance as a market. The Vietnamese government stated that the base will "attract talents from around the world and contribute to the development of Vietnam's semiconductor ecosystem and digitalization."

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On December 11th, Huang and other NVIDIA executives continued to hold work meetings at the Vietnam National Innovation Center (NIC). According to foreign media reports, NVIDIA had previously invested approximately $250 million in Vietnam.

Before Vietnam, Huang had already visited Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia.

On December 4th, Huang first arrived in Tokyo to hold talks with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. After the meeting, Huang stated in an interview that NVIDIA plans to collaborate with Japanese companies, including SoftBank, to develop generative AI. He also promised the Prime Minister that NVIDIA "will make the utmost effort to prioritize Japan's GPU demands." The Japanese government had just passed an additional budget in November, deciding to allocate about 200 billion yen in subsidies to the chip sector to strengthen Japan's position in the global semiconductor field.On December 4th, Singapore also unveiled its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2.0, proposing to double its AI workforce to 15,000 by training local talent and recruiting from abroad. Two days later, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, while in Singapore, told reporters that the company would continue to develop a series of new products in compliance with U.S. government regulations on exporting high-end chips to China, and mentioned that NVIDIA might make significant investments in Singapore.

Regarding customers in China based in Singapore, Huang assured that NVIDIA would maintain supply. Regulatory filings show that sales to Singaporean customers (including Chinese enterprises) accounted for about 15% of NVIDIA's total revenue in the three months ending in October of this year. Huang also stated that the AI accelerator market is currently very competitive: "Most competitors don't really care where we are; they compete with us everywhere we go."

During his visit to Singapore, Huang met with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to discuss Singapore's competitive strategy in the global AI race. Huang told the media that the company is in talks with the Singaporean government about potential major investments in the future, and that NVIDIA is collaborating with the government to help develop a large language model called "Sealion."

The next stop was Malaysia, where Huang, on his first visit, expressed great optimism about Malaysia becoming a leading data center hub in Southeast Asia. He explained that traditional data centers primarily serve to store data, but new AI data centers are essentially AI factories, where raw data is filtered and then transformed into valuable data, a process akin to manufacturing, and Malaysia is a great "manufacturer" with unique advantages and potential to become a leading data center technology hub in Southeast Asia.

According to local Malaysian media reports, Malaysian energy utility company YTL Power will collaborate with NVIDIA to build AI infrastructure in Malaysia, deploying NVIDIA H100 GPUs in data centers, with an investment value of approximately $4.3 billion for the AI data center. However, Huang did not comment on the aforementioned collaboration. He confirmed the construction of a data center in Malaysia but did not mention specific partners.

02

Preparing for the future under prosperous times

Establishing the NVIDIA "Empire"

Before heading to Stanford University and eventually founding NVIDIA, Huang worked at AMD and LSI Logic. His time at AMD was brief, just over a year, but it laid the groundwork for his future success in the industry. During his tenure at AMD, Huang was engaged in microprocessor design, which is a small electronic device that performs the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit. Interestingly, NVIDIA and AMD are now direct competitors in the areas of graphics processors and data center-optimized central processors.

After leaving AMD, he was hired by LSI Logic (now owned by Broadcom). This was an exciting period in his former employer's history, as the company had gone public two years prior and was still rapidly growing and expanding. LSI was a semiconductor manufacturer at the time, whose products were used to increase storage capacity and network speeds in areas such as networking and data centers. During this period, Huang held multiple positions within the company, including (not surprisingly) engineering, marketing, and ultimately, integrated management roles.NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jen-Hsun Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The two additional co-founders brought experience from Sun Microsystems and IBM. They met with Huang at a Denny's restaurant outside San Jose and founded NVIDIA with a seed capital of $40,000 over a meal.

At the time of NVIDIA's establishment, the PC industry was just taking off, and the sector was beginning to recognize the impact that the Central Processing Unit (CPU) would have. The founding team of NVIDIA was convinced that the CPU could not solve all computing problems and envisioned a future for accelerated computing. They believed that if the vision of accelerated computing were realized, the world would need specially built hardware. The first example of this was the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which was NVIDIA's first major product and an incredible innovation in the field of computer graphics.

Huang described this as placing specialists next to generalists. In this scenario, the CPU played the role of a versatile actor, while the GPU was used to solve more complex problems that the CPU could not effectively address. However, success was far from guaranteed. Huang described the idea of the GPU as an "unfunded idea" because it sounded strange at the time. Essentially, when NVIDIA was founded, all eyes and venture capital were focused on the CPU, there were no applications in the market, and significant R&D expenditures were required. The top application for a product that would complement the CPU was 3D video games, which seemed destined to fail. Huang described the founding of NVIDIA as a company facing "market challenges, technical challenges, and ecosystem challenges, with a success rate of about 0%," and added that he would not have funded NVIDIA in the early days.

NVIDIA urgently needed external capital, and through connections in the tech industry, Huang and his co-founders were able to get in touch with Don Valentine. Valentine was one of the most influential venture capitalists in the industry at the time, and he received blunt advice: "Give this kid money and see if it works." About 20 years later, we now know that it did work, and NVIDIA would continue to achieve tremendous success.

Leadership Providing Continuous Momentum

Jen-Hsun Huang has been the CEO of NVIDIA since its founding in 1993. Under his leadership, the company has grown from three people at a local Denny's booth to a company worth trillions of dollars. One constant factor during this time has been his leadership.

Mr. Huang did not want to work with those who tried to capture market share by lowering prices or making minor improvements to existing technology. Instead, he sought to hire people who sought to create breakthrough products. His goal from the beginning was to create an environment where people would want to come and work for their entire lives, and he has successfully achieved this at NVIDIA.

He believes that the most important thing is the ability to choose. There are several reasons why NVIDIA chooses to do extremely difficult things. One of the most striking aspects is that it avoids a lot of competition. Another key factor is attracting the best talent. By doing things that have never been done before and giving talented people the opportunity and patience to do what they do best, Huang says: great people continue to do great things. Through decades of chip design innovation and several strategic acquisitions, NVIDIA has been able to establish a virtuous cycle.

China Remains Important

Bringing the timeline back to the present. Huang's leadership and foresight remain outstanding, not only in terms of technological breakthroughs and innovations but also in grasping the situation. As mentioned earlier, Huang is keen on laying out the Asian chessboard, not only because of the rising status of Southeast Asia but also considering the situation in China and the surrounding conditions.NVIDIA announced on local time August 31, 2023, that the U.S. government had requested on August 26 that it cease exporting two top-tier computing chips used for artificial intelligence work to China (including Hong Kong). This control involves the NVIDIA A100 and the soon-to-be-shipped H100 chips, as well as any other chips that NVIDIA may introduce in the future with peak performance equal to or exceeding that of the A100. Systems-level products that utilize these high-performance GPU chips from NVIDIA are also within the scope of the new U.S. government regulations. NVIDIA stated that U.S. officials mentioned that the new rules "will address the risk that the covered products may be used for or diverted to 'military end uses' or 'military end users' in China."

In its announcement, NVIDIA indicated that it had sold $400 million worth of affected chips to China in the current quarter, and if Chinese companies decide not to purchase NVIDIA's alternative products, this could result in losses for the company. It stated plans to apply for an exemption from the rule, but "does not guarantee" that U.S. officials will approve it. In the evening of the same day, NVIDIA's founder and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, sent an email stating that NVIDIA would take action in response to the ban, actively contacting Chinese customers to replace with products that have inferior performance to the A100, which for most customers is already sufficiently usable.

To maintain NVIDIA's revenue and market value, Jen-Hsun Huang must be concerned. On one hand, NVIDIA is subject to U.S. chokehold controls in the Chinese market, and on the other hand, several Wall Street analysts are bearish on NVIDIA, believing it does not yet possess the comprehensive strength of a trillion-dollar company. Therefore, Huang needs to act and publicize in a high-profile manner to boost the confidence of Wall Street capital. Even though markets like Southeast Asia are far from being able to replace or alleviate the pressure of the cliff-like decline in NVIDIA's sales in the Chinese market, it is still better than nothing.

Previously, according to media reports citing sources, NVIDIA had completed the delivery of advanced artificial intelligence chips to China for this year and was working hard to deliver some orders for 2024 before the U.S. regulations took effect in mid-November. However, the U.S. government suddenly notified NVIDIA that new export restrictions on the sale of high-end chips to countries including China were "immediately effective." This could force NVIDIA to abandon Chinese orders worth over $5 billion.