Artificial intelligence, unmanned demand, Great Britain's expansion is fast, challenge Intel

This year, NVIDIA has achieved significant growth, using graphics chip technology to challenge Intel. After missing out on the smartphone chip market, the company is rapidly expanding its demand for powerful GPUs for artificial intelligence, driverless cars and data centers.

When Paulina Sliwinska, the fund manager of Bailey Gifford & Co in Edinburgh, flew to Silicon Valley to find the next big technology, she found it – it was not just graduated from Stanford University. A 23-year-old talented startup founded by a talented youngster, but a semiconductor manufacturer that has not changed its CEO for 23 years.

Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of graphics chip maker NVIDIA, claims that its products, which were once limited to computer game devices, will break out into a major component of emerging technologies from voice technology to driverless cars. This rhetoric has touched Slivenska this year. And many other investors.

“He is very attractive,” said Slivenska. “Even now, the opportunity to be in front of his company in the next decade is very amazing.” After she met Huang Renxun in August, she managed The fund added Nvidia's stock position and became the company's tenth largest shareholder. Nvidia is the best performer in the Nasdaq 100 stock index this year, and has even nearly tripled its second place.

Under the leadership of Huang Renxun, Yingwei reached a major graphics processor supplier. Graphics processors have traditionally been relatively small markets, compared to the larger market for computer and smartphone chips dominated by Intel and Qualcomm.

However, this year's conviction of Huang Renxun has begun to pay off, that is, the basic advantages of its graphics chips will enable them to play a more important role in the fast-growing areas such as artificial intelligence and driverless cars. This belief also boosted Nvidia's performance. In the third quarter, chip demand for data centers and automobiles helped the company achieve sales growth of up to 54%, and its profits doubled, setting a record.

According to Huang Renxun, that performance is attributed to the company's investment in software and hardware that has brought independent thinking to computers and automobiles over the years. On November 11, Nvidia's share price soared 30% after the release of the earnings report in the previous quarter. However, the CEO didn't have time to celebrate—his company had to fight in a market that was also targeted by two rivals, Intel and Qualcomm. Intel's annual R&D spending is twice that of NVIDIA's annual revenue, and Qualcomm's cash reserves are unmatched in the chip industry.

"The only thing we can guarantee is the speed of our innovation." Huang Renxun said in an interview at the time.

According to people familiar with the matter, Huang Renxun, 53, is still operating Nvidia as a startup, and advocates quick decision making and fast execution. For semiconductor manufacturers, that's no small achievement: designing the chip, getting it ready to enter the market, and making it, these processes can take hundreds of millions of dollars over several years. The chip company will first release a roadmap that reflects those complex details, and then build an organizational structure around it. Decisions about what to do in a multi-billion dollar factory often require comprehensive planning.

At NVIDIA, the advancement of work can be much faster. For example, in a short meeting hosted by Huang Renxun, executives may suddenly stop trying to tell the latest developments in the new chip design, because at this time Huang Renxun has called the engineer to confirm the technical problem, and then immediately decided the survival of the project. Or decide to move in the other direction.

Long-term belief

Huang Renxun has long believed that graphics chips will play an important role in technological innovation. But efforts to expand their use in the past, such as expanding to mobile phones, have either failed or took a long time to achieve substantial results.

Every year, Nvidia's new high-end GeForce chips have long been regarded as a gift by computer gamers, but until this year, Nvidia was not so respected as a company. Since its listing 17 years ago, its stock price has never been able to break through $35. On December 20th, the stock closed at more than $105.

Part of the investors and analysts who are very concerned about NVIDIA missed the company's sharp rise. The reason: they have heard of Huang Renxun’s preaching before—for example, he advocated that the company’s future lies in providing smartphone chips—Nyved’s previous efforts basically failed, so he made artificial intelligence and driverless cars. When predicting, everyone did not take him seriously.

MKM Partners analyst Ian Ing said, "His opportunities in the automotive field are as passionate as Tegra." Tegra is a mobile phone chip product from NVIDIA, which was born in 2008.

The Tegra series of chips is an attempt by NVIDIA to enter the smartphone market. Huang Renxun accurately predicted that the smartphone will soon change the computing and communication industries. However, because he and others underestimated the importance of integrated cellular connectivity, NVIDIA's products failed to achieve great success.

Unlike other companies that lost to Qualcomm, Huang Renxun did not close the project. Instead, NVIDIA created a game console called Shield to try to create a market for Tegra and show its performance to attract potential customers. Although Shield has never been able to challenge the dominance of Xbox and PlayStaTIon, the product has brought orders from Nintendo to Tegra. The game maker applied the chip to one of its new gaming systems.

“The project is more or less a science project within NVIDIA, and the chip is now adopted by Nintendo,” said STIfel Nicolaus & Co analyst Kevin Cassidy. “That’s what they created by themselves.” Another opportunity to save yourself, create a market, and then offer products to customers."

Work all night

Huang Renxun hardly sleeps, even during the holidays, because he wants to drive the night train to see anything about Nvidia and his business at hand, no matter what language he writes - he is very picky about the translation of documents, his staff needs to be on call. Respond to his needs at any time to help him translate what he wants to see. According to people who have worked for him, the creation of Nvidia and the largest graphics chip maker has brought him hundreds of millions of wealth, but he still runs the company like a paranoia, still as afraid that the company may fall at any time. People are as energetic as they are.

In public, his tone is soft, he will pay attention to the emphasis by pause, and he will also use the jargon of Silicon Valley to answer specific questions with grand discussions containing rhetoric. Inside the company, he has little patience with his subordinates.

According to him, he has to fight against the big guys since he was a child. He likes to tell his story when he was a child: his parents sent him to the place where they thought it was a private school in the United States. The school in Kentucky was a juvenile correctional school. He was very small, so in this difficult environment, He must rely on his own cleverness to form an alliance with the older children.

Huang Renxun’s enemy, Intel, is near the 101 freeway. The chip maker, also located in Santa Clara, is equally large. Analysts who have been reluctant to bet on Huang Renxun's vision and execution have argued that Intel's ability to integrate other computer functions into its processors is a threat to NVIDIA.

Indeed, NVIDIA's chipset business disappeared almost overnight after Intel decided to begin integrating that technology into its products in 2008. However, Intel has never been able to make enough good graphics chips to convince high-end computer users to leave Nvidia. Today, Huang Renxun’s company is trying to break into the fast-growing data center server chip market, which is Intel’s most profitable business.

Data torrent

Traditional data centers are filled with machines powered by Intel's most expensive server chips, and many competitors are trying to break Intel's monopoly on the market. Today, the flood of information caused by networked devices and online services has made it impossible for traditional operations to perform data analysis and usage tasks. Thanks to NVIDIA's work over the years, graphics chips have been able to run artificial intelligence systems after being programmed. This type of system is capable of performing a variety of tasks without any human intervention, such as extremely fast recognition of images and speech.

Although Intel processors are very fast at performing complex operations, they have limitations in their ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. In this area, graphics chips are beginning to make progress with the ability to perform much smaller tasks in parallel. Both Google and Amazon use graphics-based computing as part of their respective cloud services. Despite advances in graphics technology, most of the data center work is done by Intel's microprocessors, and other types of chip vendors are also tailoring low-energy products for the market. At present, investors believe that NVIDIA is in the leading position in providing artificial intelligence main engine.

"Intel is in a very hot area," said Daniel Morgan, fund manager at Synovus Trust Company. "At the moment, you have to put them at the top of the list. They seem to be in a very good position. ."

In the most recent quarter, Nvidia’s data center business revenues reached $240 million, a significant increase from $82 million in the same period last year. But that's just the skin of the market: Intel has more than 99% of the market. In the last quarter, Intel's server chip business achieved sales of $4.5 billion and profits of more than $2 billion.

In the automotive field that Huang Renxun is passionate about, NVIDIA's goal is to have a computing engine that will make cars more versatile than humans. Tegra is used to run entertainment systems, and NVIDIA has created a more powerful graphics chip to receive input from radar devices, cameras and other sensors to form electronic images of the car's surroundings. However, competition in this field is heating up. Last year, NVIDIA did not rank among the top 10 car chip providers. NXP Semiconductor NV, the chip maker that entered the list, acquired another semiconductor company, Freescale Semiconductor, last year. The combined companies are now acquired by NVIDIA's rival Qualcomm.

Huang Renxun’s willingness to make a quick change in direction is also reflected in his car choice. He is known for his love of Ferrari, but from his current photo, there are many Tesla in his private driveway. Coincidentally: He personally delivered his first new version of the complete computer for driverless cars to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose technology is the basis of Tesla's new assisted driving technology.

Semiconductor Parts

Semiconductor Parts

Semiconductor Parts

YANGZHOU POSITIONING TECH CO., LTD. , https://www.yzpst.com