jakiro
Source: Alphabet List
When he was 8 years old, Huang Renxun jumped into the sea of fire.
That was him pouring gasoline into the pool, ignite it, and then jumping 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 underwater, but he still felt unsatisfied: “So beautiful…”
This is not only a piece of memory from childhood.The coexistence of water and fire, and the observation of fire in water has almost become a metaphor for Huang Renxun’s life.
Fifty years later, the fire of AI will ignite the world, and controversy will take place every day.
Musk was disgusted with Ultraman and sent OpenAI to court again and again, describing the other party as a “devil”.
Zuckerberg was resentful of Apple. While leading Meta to attack the open source model, he opened fire to criticize Apple’s closure. When his “love” was so strong, he rarely swears on the stage.
The country is not peaceful either.Recently, the incident of Zhu Xiaohu bombarding the dark side of Yuezhi Zhang Yutong is still fermenting.In the circle of friends, Zhu Xiaohu angrily said that he would not tolerate “violating fiduciary responsibilities” and “violating business ethics and even the law”, and his words were harsh.
Between the crowds, Huang Renxun is like a complete old “good person”.
He and Masayoshi Son were on the same stage, uncovering the scars of the past, and mentioning that Masayoshi Son was once Nvidia’s largest shareholder, the atmosphere was quite relaxed.Although SoftBank sold all Nvidia stocks that year, it was a heavy blow at the trough.
He was on the same stage as Zuckerberg, who was emotional when talking about Apple, and he used a joke to resolve it without reconciling it.Although Nvidia and Apple have many grudges.
He and Musk start the praising mode. He praise Musk as “superman”, and Musk praises him on X every now and then.Although no one will forget that Tesla’s self-developed chips were stabbed in Nvidia a few years ago.
Not to mention his relationship with Taiwanese chip manufacturers in China.Chip production capacity is tight, Huang Renxun went to Taiwan several times and was photographed buying pineapples in Minnan language.In addition, Wong Renxun also appeared in Hong Kong at the end of last month. In a group photo circulating on the Internet, Wong Renxun and a group of key figures raised beer glasses at the Sham Shui Po food stall.
Watch the fire in the water without burning.
Huang Renxun is now the winner, so of course he doesn’t need to be anxious about anyone.In the years when a lot of hard to come by, the technology giant shrunk his head and wanted to establish 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 a fierce battle, even if he had the chance to get out of fire, he almost never really caused himself personal grudges.He is very good at not expressing his feelings and is also good at discussing things.
This gives him two types of character: on the one hand, Huang Renxun’s “fighting” is obvious to all, and he is even called “the most willful Party B”. The most exaggerated thing is that he went to court with Party A Microsoft in 2002 because he was unwilling to lower the price.On the other hand, he was either calm and composed in the public eye or joking with a smile or joking, or else he would do his job, but he could not see him anxiously.
Such traits are not uncommon for professional managers, such as current Apple CEO Cook or Microsoft CEO Nadella.However, it is rare for the founder to be the one who is most similar in the technology world.
Fighting and “good guy”, two types of characters are intertwined in Huang Renxun.The reason why the word “good person” needs to be put into double quotes is because behind the image of “good person”, there is actually a kind of ruthlessness that is not influenced by emotions.
Huang Renxun had an experience when he was a child and was often talked about:
When he was about 9 years old, Huang Renxun was sent to the United States by his parents, but by chance he was arranged to a special school.There are many problems in the school. My roommate is 17 years old. After taking off her clothes, she can see the scars left by multiple stabs.
Huang Renxun is not only the youngest, but also the only Chinese (or Asian).But he is good at studying, and problematic students also need to read and recognize words.So Huang Renxun tutored others for homework, and his roommate took good care of him, so no one provoked him again.
Neither becoming “they” nor wandering around the periphery, Huang Renxun integrated into the new environment in a special way.There are still behaviors that are close to each other on the surface, such as learning to smoke. In addition, he is still the child who studies hard.In the past, it is inaccurate that the outside world always described Huang Renxun’s growth experience as “a gangster in a passionate university when he was a child”, which is inaccurate.
Chameleons are integrated into each other and become a superpower of Huang Renxun.
In 2013, Huang Renxun and Lei Jun were on the same stage, located at the Beijing National Convention Center.Huang Renxun stood beside 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 chips for several years, but it had been at a disadvantage in its competition with Qualcomm, MediaTek and Intel.
Huang Renxun wanted to conquer cities and land in the mobile market, but also wanted to further open up the situation in the Chinese market. So Huang Renxun set his sights on Xiaomi, which has only been established for three years and has risen like a dark horse.That year, Xiaomi’s valuation had reached 10 billion US dollars, higher than Nvidia’s market value.
Beijing, Xiaomi, Lei Jun, Huang Renxun ran to the stage and said, “Hello everyone” and “I am also a rice fan.” At that time when Xiaomi represents the passion for friendship, it immediately ignited the enthusiasm in the audience.In fact, after a few minutes of sales, Huang Renxun spoke poor Chinese throughout the whole process, and he hugged Lei Jun, who was 6 years younger than him from time to time.The audience was very supportive. When Huang Renxun said “the best GPU”, someone in the audience shouted “Not one”.
In fact, the cooperation between Xiaomi and Nvidia has not lasted for a long time.The market response of Tegra 4 was flat, Nvidia’s market share in mobile devices further shrank, and Huang Renxun chose to retreat and announced in 2014 that he would no longer focus on the mobile phone market.
But Huang Renxun and Lei Jun were on the same stage, helping Nvidia open up consumers’ minds in the Chinese market, and also allowing Huang Renxun to find a way to cooperate with local companies.In the following years, Huang Renxun led Nvidia to cooperate with giants such as Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba in the fields of cloud computing, autonomous driving, and in-depth layout in the Chinese market.
There are many such famous scenes.
Also in 2024, we can see a variety of Huang Renxun:
When holding a Nvidia press conference in the United States, Huang Renxun fluently spoke English throughout the process and detailed technical details.Behind it is Wall Street’s burning gaze.
When attending the Nvidia China annual meeting, Huang Renxun wore a large Northeast flower jacket and danced on the stage with a red handkerchief.Behind it is the US chip ban that has caused Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to enter China.
When he went to Hong Kong, China, Huang Renxun drank beer with everyone at the food stall; when he went to Taiwan, he was photographed buying pineapples in Minnan language. Even after Liang Jian was on the same stage in Taiwan, he wanted to perform a sketch selling chips in Minnan language..Behind it is the strong bonding relationship between Huang Renxun and Taiwanese chip manufacturers, as well as the stoppage of production capacity in the case of chip supply exceeding demand.
It is not an exaggeration to give Huang Renxun the saying “You can get the hall and the kitchen”.
Huang Renxun was also on the verge of being fired, but he was good at two things: pressing the situation without saying anything and talking about things, and not letting friction ferment in the public opinion field.
After a setback in the attack on the mobile market, Huang Renxun turned the car and announced a retreat in 2014.He then pointed his direction at the automotive autonomous driving industry.
No need to guess, Huang Renxun inevitably approached Musk at this time.The two people interact more and more. At the 2015 Nvidia annual GTC conference, Huang Renxun also invited Musk to the stage and had a conversation for nearly half an hour.
By 2017, Tesla’s Model 3 began to be delivered, and 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 usher in their honeymoon period.It was also in 2016, in the early days of OpenAI, Nvidia presented a big gift, the first supercomputer DGX-1, which was loaded with 8 GPUs.To show sincerity, Huang Renxun personally sent the supercomputer to the OpenAI office and wrote his blessings on the case.Afterwards, people present signed the chassis, including Musk and technical backbone, as well as OpenAI interns.
However, such a honeymoon period ended with Tesla’s announcement of its own chip in 2018.
Musk not only claimed that Tesla chips are “full-autonomous driving self-developed chips” and “the best in the world”, but also compared them with Nvidia’s Drive Xavier chips, crushing them at 144 trillion times per second.The user has 30 trillion computing power per second.
This is a “Huang Renxun” being “brought”The moment of stabbing is also an infinitely close node to the point where the gun is fired.
But he chose to deal with it coldly and did not directly play against Musk.Nvidia issued a statement in response to the incident in the name of the company, titled “Tesla raises standards for self-driving car manufacturers”. It first expressed congratulations and praises, and then said that there were “some inaccuracies in Tesla’s statement.”It needs to be corrected.”
The statement said that the performance of Tesla’s dual-chip autonomous driving computers is meaningless compared with NVIDIA’s single-chip driving assistance system. If you want to compare it, it should be compared with NVIDIA Drive AGX Pegasus computers, which run at 320 trillion times per second..
Seeing Huang Renxun’s restrained statement, Musk also “stopped when he was better”.
Later, during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call that year, facing analysts’ questions, Huang Renxun stated that if Tesla’s self-developed chip project fails in the future, Nvidia is “happy” to help.Musk responded politely on Twitter, praising “NVIDIA has developed great hardware, and I respect NVIDIA and Huang Renxun very much.”
Huang Renxun is very skilled in blocking other people’s mouths with an attitude of just talking about things.In 2017, Google published a paper on TPU details, saying that “TPU processing speeds are 15 to 30 times faster than current GPUs and CPUs.”
In response to this, Huang Renxun chose to write an article himself, expand the comparison data, and attach a performance comparison chart. He had a strong attitude, but the controversy was quickly calmed down.
The moment when the gun almost went off fire also happened between Huang Renxun and Zhang Zhongmou.
Just last week, on November 29, the autobiography of TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou was officially published.Among them, it talked about the TSMC’s 40nm chip crisis.
In 2008, TSMC mass-produced the 40nm process and quickly locked in major customers such as Nvidia and AMD.However, more than a year after it was put into production, TSMC’s 40nm chip is in trouble with low yield.According to the normal progress, the yield rate of more than 90% should be reached about one year after the new process is put into production to meet the supply requirements. This time the yield rate of 40nm is only about 50%.
In 2009, Zhang Zhongmou was responsible for the CEO of TSMC. During the call, Huang Renxun emphasized that this unsolved case needs to be resolved urgently.Zhang Zhongmou then rushed to Huang Renxun’s home. After having a relaxed and casual “pizza dinner” with Huang Renxun and his family, the two started to communicate.Zhang Zhongmou proposed a settlement proposal for 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 cooperation in the subsequent 28nm process.
The calm discussion and unyielding relationship in the crisis deepened the revolutionary friendship between the two – perhaps Huang Renxun will not forget that at the beginning of NVIDIA, he contacted many chip manufacturers and no one was willing to take over the order, and Zhang Zhongmou personally communicated with him.and a cooperative relationship was established.
Zhang Zhongmou even proposed to Huang Renxun that he would take over TSMC and become CEO.In the new book, Zhang Zhongmou revealed that he proposed twice and Huang Renxun refused twice.When Huang Renxun rejected Zhang Zhongmou, TSMC’s market value was nearly ten times that of Nvidia.
It is also based on the previous maintenance of a decent relationship network. When Nvidia stands at the top of the world, those sweet words will not appear too abrupt.
AI is so popular, Nvidia has become the leader.Musk is having sex with Huang Renxun for Tesla and the newly founded xAI, begging him to sell more GPUs for himself.Huang Renxun really did it.
In September this year, Musk announced that Colossus, a supercomputer cluster containing 100,000 Nvidia H100, has officially launched, the world’s largest in terms of scale.Musk only took 122 days to build this supercomputer.
As a result, Huang Renxun and Musk entered their honeymoon period for the second time, and Huang Renxun called Colossus a “miracle”.Recently, Huang Renxun praised Musk for being a “superman”, and Musk praised Huang Renxun even more.
Musk’s “miracle” has become Huang Renxun’s golden signboard for selling AI chips. After praising Musk, Huang Renxun always adds a few words about the popularity of the next generation of Blackwell GPUs.The latest news shows that Musk’s xAI has sent Nvidia a GB200 order worth $1.08 billion.
At the 2024 Nvidia Japan Summit in November, Masayoshi Son was invited to the stage.Huang Renxun suddenly mentioned:“Mr. Masa, can you imagine what would happen if you were Nvidia’s largest shareholder?”When Masayoshi Son heard this, he hugged Huang Renxun and pretended to cry – the embarrassment of the past was easily resolved.
In 2017, SoftBank’s Vision Fund acquired 4.9% of Nvidia’s shares, becoming the fourth largest shareholder.In February 2019, under pressure from Vision Fund itself and the uncertain prospects of Nvidia due to the cryptocurrency decline, SoftBank sold all its shares.This move was undoubtedly a heavy blow to Nvidia, who was deeply trapped in the quagmire at the time.
Son Masayoshi and Huang Renxun have always maintained a good relationship, and later Son Masayoshi also proposed to lend money to Huang Renxun to privatize Nvidia.After SoftBank acquired Arm, Masayoshi Son also tried to sell it to Huang Renxun, but ultimately failed due to antitrust pressure.
It seems embarrassing whether to mention this past or not, but Huang Renxun took it to the stage and deconstructed it with humor in front of everyone, giving Masayoshi Son a perfect step.
Behind the smile of the “good man” Huang Renxun, there is no background of flattery, but a kind of sober and cruelty.
Huang Renxun is not without temper. Although he does not engage in public opinion verbal wars, he is not ruthless in litigation.
In addition to the lawsuit with Microsoft, a typical incident is a head-on battle with Intel.In 2009, Intel took Nvidia to court, saying that the mutually authorized patent cross-license agreement reached by the two five years ago did not apply to Intel’s next-generation integrated memory controllers.In other words, after cooperation, Intel will abandon Nvidia.
At that time, Huang Renxun sued Intel with his 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 Nvidia $1.5 billion in patent usage fees within five years, and Huang Renxun won.
But Huang Renxun doesn’t do anything like being addicted to words.
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 excited: “I get angry when I mention Apple’s source!” Then, perhaps the more I talked, Zuckerberg even sweared in a rare manner.
There is not no grudges between Huang Renxun and Apple.
Apple computers used Nvidia’s GPU in the early days, but in 2008, Nvidia’s “graphics card” incident occurred. The graphics card overheating caused the machine to malfunction, which directly caused losses to partners including Apple.Later, Apple’s trust in Nvidia decreased, and at the moment when Nvidia was eyeing the mobile phone market, it chose to develop its own chips.And it completely disabled the Nvidia GPU in 2016.
By 2019, Nvidia announced that CUDA no longer supports MacOS operating systems.Since then, Apple and Nvidia have entered a long cold war, and have even been called the “chip cold war” between the two.
As time comes in 2024, the two companies are still competing in the AI arms competition.While everyone was rushing to Nvidia chips, Apple took advantage of Amazon’s proprietary chips.
However, facing Zuckerberg, who raised Apple criticism on the stage, Huang Renxun did not follow suit.Instead, he joked that “it’s still live broadcasting now” and moved the topic away from Apple.There was neither refutation nor agreement, but I just pressed and said nothing.
He knew very well that there were no eternal friends or eternal enemies in the business world, so he had no motivation to really “become” with anyone.
Perhaps it is precisely based on this point that Huang Renxun can understand that Masayoshi Son and Musk have abandoned their decision at a certain node, and can also resist not firing on Apple.
And his allies naturally knew that behind the “good man” Huang Renxun, the relationship was dynamic.
When Zhang Zhongmou recalls the past and praises his friendship with Huang Renxun in his new book.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 important chips, mainly because TSMC has a far-reaching technology in wafer manufacturing. If necessary, NVIDIA can still make itOther options.”
In other words, Huang Renxun admitted that there is a possibility of replacing TSMC.
Huang Renxun does not believe that always being light and always being happy is the best.He almost has a kind of admiration for torture and suffering, and often preaches that he tells himself that his company will go bankrupt in 30 days.
He promised not to lay off employees when tech giants lay off employees, but said when talking about management that he “don’t think the best job is what always brings happiness”, and said bluntly that he likes to “torture” employees to enhance their abilities.
Perhaps the same is true for Huang Renxun. It is not worthy of praise for your relationship. When you go back and forth, and torture each other, it is memorable.
“Good Man” Huang Renxun continued to torture temporary enemies and temporary allies with smiles and uncertainties.Watching fire in water is so free.
References:
1. Silicon Valley 101: “Nvidia GPU Rises in Litigation and Infamy: Never Stops Fighting, No Friends forever”
2. Yang Jianyong: “Nvidia’s plunge was sold by Masayoshi Son, and his dream of betting on AI for $4 billion is shattered?》
3. Alphabet List: “Musk Chasing Trillion OpenAI”
4. Chinese Entrepreneur Magazine: “Huang Renxun: I don’t like layoffs, I would rather “torture” them
