Huang Renxun: 30 Years After Financial Freedom, I Have No Dreams

Original Title: "Huang Renxun: 30 Years After Achieving Financial Freedom, I Have No Dreams"

Original Author: Jingyu, Geek Park

The last foreigner who caused a sensation in China by wearing traditional Chinese clothing was Don King, former manager of boxing champion Mike Tyson. After more than twenty years, the second one is Huang Renxun, the founder of NVIDIA. Given Huang's current status in the tech industry and his influence, he may be comparable to Tyson at the peak of his career in the boxing world, if not even more influential.

On July 16th, 东八区, at the "Chain Expo" held in Beijing, Huang Renxun, who visited China for the third time within a year, took off his leather jacket and put on traditional Chinese clothing to deliver a speech. This image was different from his appearance three months ago when he wore a suit to meet with senior executives.

"I look pretty handsome in traditional Chinese clothing, right? That's a gift from someone else," Huang said.

In an interview with the media in the afternoon of the 16th, Huang changed back to his leather jacket, joked with the media in Chinese, and appeared to be in a very good mood. Coincidentally, just a day before the Chain Expo, NVIDIA regained its export qualification for the previously banned H20 chip and is expected to resume supplying Chinese tech companies. Additionally, a new RTX Pro chip designed specifically for digital twins and robots will also be launched in China.

From discussions with Lei Jun and Huawei's chips to the recent intense AI talent war in Silicon Valley, Huang Renxun has shared his views on various topics.

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

Talking AI with Lei Jun, Really Want to Buy a SU7 Ultra

Two days before the Chain Expo, a photo of Huang Renxun and Lei Jun circulated on social media. That day, Huang Renxun praised Lei Jun and Xiaomi, saying that decades ago when he first met Lei Jun, he foresaw that Lei Jun would create a very successful company, just like the current Xiaomi.

Years later, when they met again, Huang Renxun said he discussed AI with Lei Jun, including Xiaomi's new venture into smart electric vehicles. Regarding Lei Jun and Xiaomi's latest product—the Xiaomi electric vehicle, Huang Renxun also expressed that China's new energy vehicles are doing very well. He mentioned that he really wants to buy a Xiaomi SU7 Ultra but expressed his regret as this popular electric car is not sold in North America.

Of course, Huang Renxun also praised the products of companies like Geely, Xiaopeng, and NIO one by one, believing that they are equally outstanding. These companies are all direct customers of NVIDIA's autonomous driving chips Orin and Thor. NVIDIA dominates the autonomous driving field from chip design and simulation to training, generating $5 billion in revenue for the company annually. With the rollout of Thor chips, the market size is evidently still expanding. NVIDIA remains unmatched in the high-end autonomous driving chip sector with no real challengers.

「We have always been very grateful and have been looking for those smart clients who are trying to innovate, because this also keeps our technology innovative,」 said Huang Renxun.

H20 Is Not the Best, But It's Still Excellent

Just the day before the conference, NVIDIA announced that the U.S. had approved the export permit for the H20 chip, the AI chip that had been banned from sale for months, and it will soon be supplied again to Chinese customers.

This is good news for Chinese AI companies, internet giants, and NVIDIA itself—all of whom need AI chips for model training and inference; for the latter, occupying 15% of global revenue in the Chinese market is obviously very important, as Huang Renxun wouldn't have visited three times in six months otherwise.

Of course, compared to NVIDIA's latest chips like the GB300 announced at GTC in March, H20 is obviously not NVIDIA's best AI chip, but Huang Renxun believes H20 is still «very excellent.»

Huang Renxun is surrounded by reporters, Again!｜Image Source: GeekPark

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

Huang Renxun said that many products are designed for different use cases. He believes that H20's advantage lies in its excellent system memory bandwidth and efficiency. For models like DeepSeek, Qianwen, and Kimi that are being created, the H20 chip is very suitable.

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

In other words, the biggest use case for RTX Pro is digital twinning, which is also a key hardware foundation for NVIDIA's current focus on Omniverse. Customers are not only using Omniverse to build digital factories but also for design, simulation, training, and other work, which is also one of NVIDIA's most important business and growth curves.

Meta's «Cash Burn & Talent Raid» Exactly Proves Zuckerberg's Vision

Not only NVIDIA is crazy about AI, in the entire Silicon Valley, "talent poaching" has become the hottest term. For example, Meta recently announced a $14.5 billion acquisition of half of Scale AI, bringing the latter's founder, Alexandr Wang, on board, and establishing a new AI lab, depleting talent from across Silicon Valley.

Ren Hsun Huang believes that AI will obviously become a multi-trillion-dollar industry, and Meta sees this opportunity. That's why its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, wants to make Meta an "AI First" company, after all, Meta itself has built a massive AI data center.

"I think he decided to go all-in on AI. It's a very good decision."

Meta may be advancing rapidly, but those companies that have been poached may not be happy, for example, Apple, which just had talent in foundational models poached by Meta. Apple has been criticized for the continuous delays of its AI product, Apple Intelligence, and is considered to be lagging behind in this AI wave.

However, Ren Hsun Huang, holding a Google Pixel phone, believes that Apple has enough talent and resources, and they seem to be lagging, just "working on their own timetable." He chose the Google Pixel phone because NVIDIA also develops the Android system, and it is based on stock Android.

"No extra stuff, simple and clean, I really like it."

Financially Free for a Long Time, No Dreams

Just last week, NVIDIA became the world's first company to surpass a market cap of $4 trillion, which is an honor for any founder and CEO.

However, Ren Hsun Huang doesn't seem particularly excited about this.

"I'm probably the only one in the world who enjoys being the CEO of both the lowest and highest valued company. " Ren Hsun Huang explained that NVIDIA has experienced a low point, with a market cap close to zero, and he has "kept a low profile for a long time." Now with the highest global market cap, but more importantly, what the company has done—created a new form of computing (accelerated computing) and led the recent AI wave.

That being said, as NVIDIA's market cap surpasses $4 trillion, Ren Hsun Huang's net worth has also increased to $143.6 billion, ranking seventh on the global billionaire list.

Similarly, for Ren Hsun Huang, this is not something to boast about, at least not something that would lead to any particular dreams just because of a huge fortune.

「I have been wealthy for a long time. When I talk about wealth, I only mean that 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 more risks, maybe contributing to others, helping others.」

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