Jen-Hsun Huang: Financial freedom 30 years later, I have no dreams

Very few CEOs can handle difficult times with such ease.

Written by: Jingyu

Source: Geek Park

The last foreigner to cause a huge sensation in China by wearing a Tang suit was Michael Tyson's former manager, Don King. After a gap of more than twenty years, the second is Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia. Given Huang's current status in the tech world, it may even surpass that of Tyson at the peak of his boxing career.

On July 16, Beijing time, at the "Chain Expo" held in Beijing, Jensen Huang, who visited China for the third time in a year, changed out of his leather jacket and wore a traditional Tang suit for his speech, which was different from the image of meeting with senior executives in a suit three months ago.

"I look pretty handsome in a Tang suit, that's a gift from someone else."

During a media interview on the afternoon of the 16th, Jensen Huang switched back to a leather jacket and joked with the media in Chinese, looking quite good—understandably so, as the day before the Chain Expo, NVIDIA regained export qualifications for the H20 chip, which had previously been banned from export, and is expected to continue supplying Chinese tech companies. Additionally, a chip specifically designed for digital twins and robots, the RTX Pro chip, will also be launched in China.

From talking about the photo with Lei Jun, to Huawei's chips, and then to the recent super crazy AI talent war in Silicon Valley, Jensen Huang has shared his views.

Just a few days ago, Nvidia became the world's first company to surpass a market value of $4 trillion, yet the creator of this highest-valued company stated that he "has no dreams."

Chatting with Lei Jun about AI, I really want to buy a SU7 Ultra.

Two days before the Chain Expo, a photo of Huang Renxun and Lei Jun circulated widely on social media. That day, Huang Renxun spoke highly of Lei Jun and Xiaomi, stating that he foresaw Lei Jun would create a very successful business when they met decades ago, just like Xiaomi today.

Years later, during a reunion, Jensen Huang mentioned discussing AI with Lei Jun, and of course, the Xiaomi car. Regarding the hottest product from Lei Jun and Xiaomi right now—the Xiaomi car—Huang stated that Chinese new energy vehicles are doing very well, and he is very eager to buy a Xiaomi SU7 Ultra. However, since this popular electric vehicle is not sold in North America, he can only express his "deep regret."

Of course, Jensen Huang also praised the products of companies like Geely, Xpeng, and Li Auto, believing that they are also very outstanding. If nothing unexpected happens, these companies are clearly direct customers of NVIDIA's self-driving chips Orin and Thor. NVIDIA has covered all aspects of autonomous driving, from chips, design, simulation to training, generating $5 billion in revenue for the company each year. With the rollout of the Thor chip, it is obvious that the market size continues to expand, and NVIDIA still does not have any real challengers in the high-end self-driving chip sector.

"We have always been grateful for and are looking for those smart customers who try to innovate, as this also keeps our technology innovative," said Huang Renxun.

H20 is not the best, but it is still excellent

Just a day before the press conference, NVIDIA announced that the United States has approved the export license for the H20 chip, which has been banned for several months, and will soon be supplied again to Chinese customers.

This is good news for Chinese AI companies and internet giants, as well as for Nvidia itself— the former needs AI chips to train models and perform inference; for the latter, the Chinese market, which accounts for 15% of global revenue, is obviously very important, otherwise Jensen Huang wouldn't have visited three times in half a year.

Of course, compared to the latest chips like the GB300 released by NVIDIA at GTC in March, the H20 is clearly not NVIDIA's best AI chip, but Jensen Huang believes the H20 is still "very excellent."

Jensen Huang was surrounded by reporters again!｜Photo source: Geek Park

"H20 is not our best product, but you know, I have many 'children', and I won't rank them."

Jensen Huang stated that many products are designed for different usage scenarios. He believes that the advantage of H20 is its excellent system memory bandwidth, which is very efficient. And for models like DeepSeek, Qianwen, and Kimi that are being developed, they are very suitable for the H20 chip.

At the same time, NVIDIA will also sell RTX Pro chips in China, which are based on the Blackwell architecture. The biggest advantage of this chip is its capabilities in computer graphics and ray tracing. Ray tracing is crucial for sensor simulation, such as lidar and radar, as well as computer graphics. With this technology, people can simulate sensors inside digital factories, sensors in autonomous vehicles, or sensors in robots.

In other words, the primary use case for RTX Pro is digital twins, which is also an important hardware foundation for NVIDIA's current focus, Omniverse. Customers not only use Omniverse to create digital factories but also for design, simulation, and training, which are also among NVIDIA's most important businesses and growth trajectories.

Meta's "burning money to attract talent" precisely proves that Zuckerberg has vision.

It’s not just NVIDIA that is crazy for AI; in the entire Silicon Valley, "talent poaching" has become the hottest term at the moment. For example, Meta has spent $14.5 billion to acquire half of Scale AI, bringing its founder Alexandr Wang under its wing and establishing a new AI laboratory, draining talent from the entire Silicon Valley.

Jensen Huang believes that AI will clearly become a multi-trillion dollar industry, and Meta has seen this opportunity, so its founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to make Meta an "AI First" company. After all, Meta has already built massive AI data centers.

"I think he decided to fully commit to AI. That's a very good decision."

Meta may be moving forward at a rapid pace, but the companies that have been poached may not be so happy, such as Apple, which has just had its foundational model talent poached by Meta. Apple has been criticized for its AI product, Apple Intelligence, which has faced continuous delays and is considered to be lagging behind in this wave of AI.

However, Huang Renxun, holding a Google Pixel phone, believes that Apple has enough talent and resources, and they seem to be falling behind, just "acting according to their own timetable." The reason he chose the Google Pixel phone is that Nvidia also develops the Android system, and it is based on native Android.

"Nothing extra, simple and clean, I really like it."

Financial freedom has been a long time, without dreams

Just last week, Nvidia became the first company in the world to surpass a market value of $4 trillion, which is an honor for any founder and CEO.

However, Jensen Huang does not seem particularly excited about this.

"I might be the only person in the world who enjoys being the CEO of both the lowest market cap company and the highest market cap company," said Jensen Huang, explaining that Nvidia once faced a low point, with its market value close to zero, while he himself had "stayed low-key for a long time." Now, it has the highest market cap globally, but more importantly, what the company has done - creating a new form of computing (accelerated computing) and leading the AI wave in recent years.

That said, with Nvidia's market value surpassing $4 trillion, Jensen Huang's net worth has also increased to $143.6 billion, ranking seventh on the global billionaire list.

Similarly, for Jensen Huang, this is not something to brag about, at least it won't create any special dreams just because he has a huge fortune.

"I have been wealthy for a long time. When I say wealthy, I mean you have enough money. If you have enough money, you don't have to worry about your children and family, you can send them to school, create a good life for your family, and then you can focus on doing other things, like building Nvidia, taking on more risks, and maybe contributing to others, helping others."

However, until the end of the interview, Huang Renxun did not reveal who the Tang suit gift came from.