There’s No AI Without Nvidia. Meet the CEO Powering the Future

How massive is your concern that these constraints will spur China to spin up aggressive AI chips?

China has issues which are aggressive.

Right. This isn’t data-center scale, however the Huawei Mate 60 smartphone that got here out final yr obtained some consideration for its homegrown 7-nanometer chip.

Really, actually good firm. They’re restricted by no matter semiconductor processing expertise they’ve, however they’ll nonetheless be capable of construct very giant methods by aggregating lots of these chips collectively.

How involved are you basically, although, that China will be capable of match the US in generative AI?

The regulation will restrict China’s capability to entry state-of-the-art expertise, which implies the Western world, the international locations not restricted by the export management, could have entry to a lot better expertise, which is transferring pretty quick. So I believe the limitation places numerous price burden on China. You can at all times, technically, combination extra of the chipmaking methods to do the job. But it simply will increase the price per unit on these. That’s most likely the simplest approach to consider it.

Does the truth that you’re constructing compliant chips to maintain promoting in China have an effect on your relationship with TSMC, Taiwan’s semiconductor delight and pleasure?

No. A regulation is particular. It’s no completely different than a velocity restrict.

You’ve stated fairly just a few instances that of the 35,000 elements which are in your supercomputer, eight are from TSMC. When I hear that, I believe that should be a tiny fraction. Are you downplaying your reliance on TSMC?

No, in no way. Not in any respect.

So what level are you attempting to make with that?

I’m merely emphasizing that in an effort to construct an AI supercomputer, a complete lot of different elements are concerned. In truth, in our AI supercomputers, nearly the complete semiconductor trade companions with us. We already companion very intently with Samsung, SK Hynix, Intel, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, and so forth and so forth. In our AI supercomputers, once we succeed, a complete bunch of corporations succeed with us, and we’re delighted by that.

How typically do you speak to Morris Chang or Mark Liu at TSMC?

All the time. Continuously. Yeah. Continuously.

What are your conversations like?

These days we speak about superior packaging, planning for capability for the approaching years, for superior computing capability. CoWoS [TSMC’s proprietary method for cramming chip dies and memory modules into a single package] requires new factories, new manufacturing traces, new tools. So their assist is admittedly, actually fairly vital.

I not too long ago had a dialog with a generative-AI-focused CEO. I requested who Nvidia’s opponents may be down the street, and this individual recommended Google’s TPU. Other individuals point out AMD. I think about it’s not such a binary to you, however who do you see as your greatest competitor? Who retains you up at night time?

Lauren, all of them do. The TPU staff is extraordinary. The backside line is, the TPU staff is admittedly nice, the AWS Trainium staff and the AWS Inferentia staff are actually extraordinary, actually glorious. Microsoft has their inside ASIC improvement that’s ongoing, referred to as Maia. Every cloud service supplier in China is constructing inside chips, after which there’s a complete bunch of startups which are constructing nice chips, in addition to current semiconductor corporations. Everybody’s constructing chips.