And I want to get started just with a question that is

really basic, but I think chips have been in the

ecosystem a lot more lately, and there's people

who probably didn't even really know what a

semiconductor was a few years ago.

Can you give me a very basic definition of what

Nvidia is?

Wow, that's an easy question.

Well, we are a technology company that processes

software. For applications and domains of science that

are barely possible without us.

And so because of what we do, we can make what is

barely possible, possible.

Or we can make something that is very energy

consuming, very energy efficient.

Or we could turn something that costs a lot of money

and make it much more affordable. And so we

created this thing called accelerated computing, and

that was what we pioneered about three decades ago.

And it's taken until now to really take off.

In the early days at Denny's with Chris and Curtis, the

dream was probably simpler.

Can you explain what it what your first dream was,

what the vision was, even though now it's come so far

to be this accelerated computing company?

Well, at the time, if you go back 30 years, at the time

the PC revolution was just starting.

The microprocessor was starting to take off.

The CPU was starting to take off.

And there was quite a bit of debate about: what is the

future of computing and how should software be run?

And there was a large camp, and rightfully so, that

believed that CPU or general purpose software was

the best way to go and it was the best way to go for a

long time. We felt, however, that there was a

class of applications that wouldn't be possible without

acceleration.

Or you couldn't make it affordable enough for

everybody to enjoy without acceleration.

And so we started this accelerator company, this

accelerated computing company, to solve those

problems. In the beginning, there weren't that many

applications for it, frankly, and we smartly

chose one particular combination that was a home

run. It was computer graphics, and we applied it

to video games.

And that combination turned out to have been a giant

industry. And now video games is the largest

industry in the world and the largest entertainment

industry in the world.

And it drove our technology for three decades because

making video games more and more realistic, making it

available to more people, took a long time.

And we're still in that journey and frankly,

probably early in that journey.

There are now probably, you know, over a billion gamers

in the world, but there are 8 billion people.

Someday everybody's going to be a gamer.

And so it's going to be the largest by far entertainment

industry. And so it turned out to have been a fantastic

technology driver for our company.

And we step-by-step added more and more things that we

could do, to today, artificial intelligence.

Beyond gaming and graphics, Nvidia has grown immensely.

I think that there's a lot of things people might be

surprised to hear are powered by Nvidia.

Can you just give a very simple list of some of the

use cases and big name customers that people might

be surprised to hear are powered by Nvidia?

People would probably be surprised that the most

powerful and energy efficient supercomputers in

the world, that are used for molecular dynamic

simulations to climate science research to material

science research to quantum computing research, are

powered by Nvidia.

All the way to the other extreme: a whole bunch of

robots that are powered by Nvidia in manufacturing

lines. Self-driving cars that are powered by Nvidia

to the Nintendo Switch that I'm very proud of that's

powered by Nvidia. So we're in very powerful systems and

we're in very energy efficient systems.

And probably one of the most talked about systems

today are the systems at the Microsoft Azure data

centers that are powering ChatGPT.

And the work that we did with OpenAI in the very

beginning to now that Powers ChatGPT.

I think those are really quite exciting.

I'm going to come back to ChatGPT for sure, but first

I wanted to ask you about betting it all.

This is something that you have not shied away from in

the 30 years since you started the company.

It was maybe seven times that you've been reinvented

and faced, you know, success or utter failure.

What is the lesson here?

Well, we're in a really fast moving industry.

You know, technology is incredible in the sense that

such enormous challenges and problems could be solved

by computing, on the one hand.

On the other hand, the technology changes.

And there are so many great companies in the world and

we're pursuing very similar aspirations.

We want to solve the world's greatest challenges.

And so every now and then, a technology revolution

comes along. We were started in the PC

revolution. After that, the Internet revolution came and

all of a sudden the companies before it, some of

them didn't make it to the revolution.

And some great new companies like Google and others got

invented during that time.

And then the cloud computing revolution came.

And then the mobile cloud computing revolution came.

And now we're talking about the AI revolution.

And so each one of these transitions, it's very

unlikely that the companies that were great before it

are still great after it.

And there are some companies that have made the

ability to, because of their adaptability and

agility, reinvented themselves along the way.

We had to reinvent ourselves in each one of

those technology revolutions.

And, you know, agility is just really, really, really

important to companies.

And one of the things that I'm really proud about our

company is, at the core of our company is incredible

technology. We have incredible technologists.

You know, if you're pioneering one of the most

important computing platforms in the world, from

use for scientific computing to genomics to

digital biology, all the way to video games, well

you're going to need incredible computer

scientists. So on the one hand, we're incredibly

technology rich.

On the other hand, we're in an enormous, we're in a

giant sea of technology companies.

And so the ability for us to adapt and reinvent

ourselves and continue to be relevant and from one

generation to another generation was really

important. And I'm very proud of that.

It hasn't always been success.

Can you talk to me about some of the biggest stumbles

that you've had to overcome in the years?

Well, you know, every company makes mistakes and I

make a lot of them.

And, you know, some of them puts the company in peril,

especially in the beginning, because we were

small and were up against very, very large companies

and we're trying to invent this brand new technology.

And, you know, when you invent something new, you

have to convince customers to use it.

You have to convince the ecosystem it's the right

thing to use. And you've got developers, you know.

We're a computing company, so developers matter a lot

to us. And so we're trying to invent something new and

we're barely, we barely know exactly what we're

doing, you know?

So when you're doing something that's never been

done before, you're not exactly sure what you're

doing. And yet, on the other hand, you have these

giant companies who would like you not to disrupt the

industry. And so early on, there were product mistakes

that we made.

There were, you know, execution challenges that we

had. There were some strategy mistakes that I

made. And, you know, there's just so many of

them. And, you know, one of the skills of resilience is

the ability to forget the past.

You know, just as coaches tell you, don't worry about

the last down, worry about the next down.

And so I tried to make sure that the company remembers

our learnings from the mistakes.

Most founders would be very satisfied being at the helm

of such a huge industry with gaming graphics.

What signaled to you, and when, that it wasn't enough?

Well, our ambition was always to be a computing

platform company.

We selected computer graphics and video games as

our first market combination: technology,

market, product technology and market combination.

But we always believed that accelerated computing

was going to be impactful for many, many different

industries. We expanded from video games into

design. And today just about every product that's

designed or every digital asset or movie or, you know,

almost anything that's designed in 2D or 3D

digitally uses Nvidia somehow.

And then we extended that into scientific computing,

into physical simulation.

And it started with seismic processing, as a field

called inverse physics, to particle simulations,

molecular dynamic simulations, and so on and

so forth, and fluids.

And just about every field of science we're in today.

And so I'm really proud of that.

And that led us to a much more general purpose type of

accelerated computing that we created.

Which then, one day, artificial intelligence

found us.

You know, this is one of the things that's really

amazing about a computing platform.

You have a vision about what you want to create.

And for whatever reason, you differentiate in your

computing approach.

And maybe you made it super convenient in the cloud.

Maybe you made it possible for you to keep the computer

with you all the time: mobile cloud.

And in our case, accelerated computing makes it possible

for you to solve problems that were impossible

before, or much more energy efficient than before.

And so there's a fundamental reason that

makes a new computing architecture successful.

And at some point, the positive feedback system

starts to work. You know, you reach now a lot of

different customers and different applications.

We're in every cloud, made by every computer company,

and then all of a sudden one day a new application

that wasn't possible before discovers you.

First you discover them, and then pretty soon they

discover you. And this positive feedback system

starts to feed on itself.

I assume you're talking about the moment with

AlexNet and CUDA powering that, and sort of the big

bang of AI, if you will.

I'm curious how much of that you feel like was luck?

I mean, what you're talking about is it finding you.

It sounds a bit like luck.

And how much of it was foresight?

Well, it wasn't foresight.

The foresight was accelerated computing.

The foresight was making this architecture exactly

the same for everybody.

Having the discipline of staying true to that

platform for generation after generation after

generation, believing that eventually our install base

would be so large that not only would we have reach,

but applications would therefore be enabled by us.

New entire applications that weren't possible before

would discover us.

This is the nature of cloud.

This was the nature of PC.

This was the nature of mobile cloud.

And each one of these revolutions and generations

of technology. In the beginning there was some