Wednesday evening, computer chip and software maker Nvidia announced it made $30 billion in revenue last quarter — double what it made a year ago, and beating Wall Street expectations.
With market cap of $3 trillion, Nvidia is now considered one of the nation’s most valuable companies, second only to Apple.
Nvidia is the American dream writ big.
Founder Jensen Huang moved to the United States as the child of Taiwanese immigrants.
He graduated from high school in Oregon at age 16, and ended up with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.
This week, an awed Internet went wild over Huang’s LinkedIn profile, which lists:
- Dishwasher, Busboy, Waiter | Denny’s | 1978-1983
- Founder and CEO | Nvidia | 1993-Present
As its only two entries.
“This is the most motivational thing I have ever seen,” a commentator remarked on X.
It was a Denny’s in East San Jose, in fact, that Huang, by then designing microprocessors, met with some disenchanted Silicon Valley engineers decided to start the “next version,” Nvidia.
The initial inspiration was to make better chips for video games, which they rightly saw as a lucrative market.
Today, much of what has fueled Nvidia’s growth is its pioneering work in artificial intelligence.
Nvidia has about 80% and 95% of the world market in AI chip design and software, according to Reuters.
To achieve this, Nvidia’s employees work hard.
As Bloomberg reported this week, some engineers toil seven-day weeks until 2 am at the Santa Clara, Calif. company.
But few quit because the pay is very good — if you’ve been at Nvidia for more than five years, you’re almost certainly a millionaire.
“If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy,” Huang told “60 Minutes.”
Quite right. If only politicians thought the same way.
American capitalism has a long history of big risks and big rewards, but the Democrats that would stifle innovation don’t care about that.
Given their way, they would regulate and tax companies like Nvidia into oblivion.
The US has led the computer revolution, the software revolution, the Internet revolution and, for now, the AI revolution.
But the progressive takeover of government bureaucracy threatens all that.
The exuberance may or may not last for a company that is — at least for now — on the cutting edge of this technology because that’s how our great economy works.
The best thing government can do is get out of the way.
As for AI, the promise behind Nvidia’s rise, I disagree with the doomsayers who worry that the company’s success is a disaster for the economy..
Why do we need truck drivers if AI technology can be used to deliver goods cheaply and efficiently to your home via a driverless AI car?
Will AI replace all humans and leave us no jobs?
All valid concerns that I witnessed firsthand. I grew up in Westchester.
Friends of mine worked at the GM plant in Tarrytown because it was a good blue-collar job that didn’t demand a college degree.
When the plant closed in early 1990s, I remembered how lives were shattered.
But it also forced people to innovate with their lives and go where the money is.
Factory line workers became mechanics or went back to school to learn a skill that taps into the information economy.
I remember when I covered the dotcom bubble during the 1990s.
The doomsayers predicted that dot-coms would destroy swaths of the economy.
When the bubble popped and just the opposite happened.
Many of the dotcoms (remember Pets.com?) crashed and burned into insolvency,
Amazon survived, Google was created in the ashes of the bubble as was Facebook, and a new economy was born, many millions of jobs created as were many millionaires and billionaires who pay taxes and start businesses that employ working class people.
The apocalypse never came; our economy became more innovative and created new and better jobs.
If history is any guide, AI will follow the same path.
So, take some pride in it.
