Nvidia had to comply with US export controls and redesigned its products to keep selling legally in China, the company’s founder and chief executive, Jensen Huang, said in a 2023 interview.
Huang described the restrictions as a challenge the company could work through. His remarks preceded the tighter controls described in CNBC’s “Nvidia In Crisis: The Rise Of Jensen Huang’s Empire At The Center Of The AI Boom,” published Nov. 13.
“The first thing that we have to do is comply with the regulations,” Huang said. He described about a month of disruption as employees redesigned products to meet the rules.
“We’re going to be able to work through it,” he said. The interview did not establish how long those redesigned products would remain eligible for sale under later restrictions.
Huang also described an extended future running the business. Asked how long he expected to continue, he linked his tenure to whether he could still contribute to the company and its employees.
“I feel that I’m making a real contribution to the company and to them,” he said. He offered “3 or 4 decades” as a possible horizon, without giving a departure date.
His account of Nvidia’s beginnings focused on attempts to build technology that larger competitors did not offer. He acknowledged that some of his decisions had put the business at risk when it was small.
“Every company makes mistakes, and I make a lot of them,” he said. Nvidia initially concentrated on video games because computer graphics offered a use for its approach to speeding up calculations.
Huang described a division over computing’s future when the business began. General-purpose processors could handle many applications, but he believed other tasks required additional hardware to perform calculations faster.
That approach later helped Nvidia move into artificial intelligence. Its graphics processing units, chips that handle many calculations at once, could also support the computing needed to train AI systems.
Huang said the company committed its business to that opportunity after recognising its potential. “Every chip that we made was focused on artificial intelligence,” he said.
He described changing the business throughout its operations to support that decision. The shift extended technology developed for graphics into software that learns from data.
Huang also credited Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. with making Nvidia’s business possible. Nvidia designed chips while relying on the manufacturer to produce them, avoiding the expense of operating its own factories.
His comments connected the company’s expansion to repeated decisions to pursue new computing uses. They supplied neither a timetable for future access to China nor a firm endpoint for his leadership.
