"Good person" Huang Renxun, watching the fire in the water, feels at ease.

Source: Alphabet List

At the age of 8, Huang Renxun jumped into the fire.

That’s when he poured gasoline into the pool, lit it, and jumped in. Oil is lighter than water, and the water is already a flame, but the water is still quiet.

Years later, Huang Renxun recalled the feeling of looking up at the firelight underwater, still feeling unsatisfied: “So beautiful…”

This is not just a fragment of childhood memories. The coexistence of water and fire, watching fire in the water, has almost become a metaphor for Huang Renxun’s life.

Fifty years later, the fire of AI will ignite the world, and controversies will be staged every day.

Musk can’t stand Ultraman, repeatedly taking OpenAI to court and describing them as ‘demons’.

Zuckerberg is resentful of Apple, leading Meta to attack the Open Source big model, while criticizing Apple’s closed system. When the emotions ran high, he rarely swore on stage.

The situation is not peaceful in the country. Recently, the incident of Zhu Xiaohu attacking Zhang Yutong on the dark side of the moon is still fermenting. In the circle of friends, Zhu Xiaohu angrily stated that he could not tolerate the “violation of entrusted responsibility”, “violation of commercial ethics and even law”, the language used can be described as heavy.

Amidst all the hustle and bustle, Huang Renxun behaves like a true old ‘good person’.

He and Masayoshi Son appeared on the same stage, unveiling the old wounds, mentioning that Masayoshi Son was once the largest shareholder of NVIDIA, but the atmosphere was quite relaxed. Although that year SoftBank dumped all of its NVIDIA shares, it was a heavy blow at the low point.

He was on the same stage as Zuckerberg, who spoke passionately about Apple, but he defused the situation with a joke and did not join in. Although there is no shortage of grievances between NVIDIA and Apple.

He and Musk have started a praise mode. He praised Musk as a “superman”, and Musk often praised him on X. Although no one will forget that Tesla’s self-developed chip stabbed Nvidia fiercely a few years ago.

Not to mention his relationship with Taiwanese chip manufacturers. Due to tight chip production capacity, Huang Renxun has visited Taiwan several times and was spotted buying pineapples in Minnan dialect. In addition, Huang Renxun was also seen in Hong Kong at the end of last month, and in a photo circulating on the internet, Huang Renxun and a group of key figures raised beer glasses at a dai pai dong in Sham Shui Po.

Watching fire in water, without a single spark.

Huang Renxun is now in the role of the winner, of course, he doesn’t need to be impatient with anyone. In a time when cores are scarce, technology giants are eager to establish a good relationship with him.

However, looking back, it is not difficult to find that even when Huang Renxun was not at the peak, even in the midst of fierce battles, even with the opportunity for accidental discharge, he rarely really caused personal grievances. He is very good at keeping silent and sticking to the facts.

This allows him to have two personalities at the same time: on the one hand, Huang Jenxun’s “aggressiveness” is obvious to all, and he is even called “the most willful Party B”, and the most exaggerated is that in 2002, because he was unwilling to reduce prices, he went to court with Party A and Microsoft. On the other hand, in the public eye, he is either calm and composed, or he jokes with a smile, or he does his job, but he can’t see his anxious eyes.

Such qualities are not uncommon among professional managers, such as current Apple CEO Cook or Microsoft CEO Nadella. However, it is rare to see them in founders, with perhaps only Lei Jun in the tech industry being the closest comparison.

Aggressive and “good guy” are intertwined in Huang. The reason why the word “good guy” needs to be put in double quotation marks is because behind the image of “good guy” is actually a ruthlessness that is not swayed by emotions.

Huang Renxun had a childhood experience that was often talked about by others with relish:

At the age of about 9, Huang Renxun was sent to the United States by his parents, but by a twist of fate, he was arranged to attend a special school. There were many troubled students in the school, with roommates aged 17, bearing scars from multiple knife wounds when undressed.

Huang Renxun is not only the youngest, but also the only Chinese (or Asian). But he studies well, and problem students also have the need to learn to read. So Huang Renxun tutors others in their studies, and his roommates also take good care of him, so no one bothers him anymore.

Neither becoming ‘them’ nor wandering on the periphery, in a special way, Huang Renxun has integrated into the new environment. There are still behaviors that seem to converge on the surface, such as learning to smoke, but apart from that, he is still the studious child. In the past, the external world always described Huang Renxun’s growth experience as ‘a little rascal in a passionate high school,’ which is inaccurate.

Chameleons generally blend in and become a superpower of Huang Renxun.

In 2013, Huang Renxun and Lei Jun appeared on the same stage at the Beijing National Convention Center. Huang Renxun stood beside Lei Jun and shouted in Chinese, ‘I am also a Mi Fan!’

At that time, NVIDIA had been entering the mobile market with its Tegra series of chips for several years, but it had been lagging behind in the competition with Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Intel.

Huang Renxun wants to dominate the mobile market and expand further in the Chinese market, so he set his sights on Xiaomi, which had risen rapidly in just three years. In that year, Xiaomi’s valuation had already reached billions of dollars, surpassing Nvidia’s Market Cap.

Beijing, Xiaomi, Lei Jun, Huang Renxun ran onto the stage and said “Hello everyone” and “I am also a fan of Xiaomi”. At that time when Xiaomi represented the enthusiast sentiment, it instantly ignited the enthusiasm of the audience. In fact, during the few minutes of promotion, Huang Renxun spoke in broken Chinese the whole time, occasionally hugging Lei Jun, who is six years younger. The audience was very supportive, and when Huang Renxun said “the best GPU”, someone in the audience shouted “second to none”.

In fact, the cooperation between Xiaomi and NVIDIA did not last long. The market response to Tegra 4 was mediocre, and NVIDIA’s market share in mobile devices further shrank. Huang Renxun chose to withdraw and announced in 2014 that he would no longer focus on the mobile phone market.

But Huang Renxun and Lei Jun are on the same stage, helping Nvidia open the consumer mind in the Chinese market, and also allowing Huang Renxun to touch the door of cooperation with local enterprises. In the following years, Huang Renxun led Nvidia to cooperate with Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and other giants in the fields of cloud computing, autonomous driving, etc., and deeply layout in the Chinese market.

There are many more such great scenes.

In 2024, we will see various Huang Renxun.

During the NVIDIA press conference in the United States, Huang Renxun spoke fluent English and elaborated on the technical details. Behind him were the eager eyes of Wall Street.

Huang Renxun put on a Northeast China-style padded jacket and danced on stage with a red handkerchief during the NVIDIA China Annual Conference. Behind this, the US chip ban has hindered the entry of NVIDIA’s most advanced AI chips into China.

When going to Hong Kong, Huang Renxun drinks beer with others at dai pai dong; when going to Taiwan, he was photographed buying pineapples in Minnanese, even when he and Liang Jian were on the same stage in Taiwan, they also performed a sketch to promote chips in Minnanese. Behind this, there is a strong relationship between Huang Renxun and Taiwanese chip manufacturers, as well as production capacity constraints in the situation of chip supply exceeding demand.

The phrase “able to handle both the drawing room and the kitchen” is quite fitting for Huang Renxun.

Huang Renxun has also walked on the edge of the gun, but he is very good at two things: pressing not to express and discussing things, not letting friction ferment in the public opinion field.

After being defeated in the mobile market, Huang Renxun turned his attention to the self-driving car industry and announced his withdrawal in 2014.

No need to guess, at this time Huang Renxun inevitably gets closer to Musk. The interaction between the two is increasing. At the 2015 annual GTC conference of NVIDIA, Huang Renxun even invited Musk to the stage for a conversation that lasted nearly half an hour.

In 2017, TSL’s Model 3 began delivery, and both the Model 3 and the previous generations of Model S and Model X are equipped with Nvidia Drive PX2 chips.

Musk and Huang Renxun ushered in a honeymoon period. Also in 2016, during the early days of OpenAI, NVIDIA presented a gift, the first Supercomputer DGX-1 with 8 GPUs. To show sincerity, Huang Renxun personally delivered this supercomputer to the OpenAI office and wrote blessings on the chassis. Afterwards, everyone present, including Musk and technical backbone, as well as OpenAI interns, signed on the chassis.

However, such a honeymoon period came to an end when TSL announced the self-developed chip in 2018.

Elon Musk not only claimed that the TSL chip is a “fully self-driving self-developed chip”, and is “the best in the world”, but also compared it with Nvidia’s Drive Xavier chip, with a computing power of 1.44 quadrillion times per second, crushing the latter’s 300 trillion times per second.

This is the moment when Huang Jenxun was “stabbed in the back”, and it is also a Node that is infinitely close to misfire. **

But he chose to handle it coldly and not directly confront Musk. NVIDIA responded to this in the name of the company, with a statement titled ‘TSL Raises the Standards for Autonomous Vehicle Manufacturers’, first expressing congratulations and praise, and then stating that there were ‘some inaccuracies’ and ‘corrections’ needed in TSL’s statement.

The statement said that it is meaningless to compare the performance of TSL’s dual-chip autonomous driving computer with Nvidia’s single-chip driving assistance system. If comparison is required, it should be compared with Nvidia’s Drive AGX Pegasus computer, which operates at a speed of 3.2 million trillion operations per second.

Seeing Huang Renxun’s restrained statement, Musk also decided to call it a day.

Later, during the TSL Q2 earnings conference call of that year, when faced with questions from analysts, Huang Renxun stated that if TSL’s self-developed chip project fails in the future, NVIDIA would be “happy” to help. Musk politely responded on Twitter, praising NVIDIA for developing great hardware and expressing his respect for NVIDIA and Huang Renxun.

Shutting others’ mouths with a matter-of-fact attitude is a skill Huang Renxun is very proficient at. In 2017, Google released a paper on the details of TPU, stating that “TPU processing speed is 15 to 30 times faster than current GPUs and CPUs”.

In response to this, Huang Renxun chose to personally write an article, presenting comparative data and attaching performance comparison charts. His attitude was strong, but the controversy quickly subsided.

The moment of almost accidentally firing the gun also occurred between Huang Renxun and Zhang Zhongmou.

Just last week, on November 29th, the second volume of the autobiography of Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, was officially published. It mentioned the crisis of TSMC’s 40nm chips.

In 2008, TSMC began mass production of 40nm process and quickly secured major customers such as NVIDIA and AMD. However, more than a year after production, TSMC’s 40nm chips were plagued by low yield rates. According to normal progress, the yield rate should reach over 90% within about one year of production to meet supply requirements, but the yield rate for this 40nm process is only around 50%.

In 2009, when Zhang Zhongmou took over as CEO of TSMC, Huang Renxun emphasized the urgent need to resolve this pending case during a phone call. Zhang Zhongmou then rushed to Huang Renxun’s home, and after having a casual and relaxed “pizza dinner” with Huang Renxun and his family, the two engaged in communication. Zhang Zhongmou proposed a settlement suggestion of over a billion US dollars in compensation, which Huang Renxun agreed to. Within 48 hours, the crisis was resolved.

Under the compensation of Zhang Zhongmou, Huang Renxun still firmly chose TSMC’s 40nm process and laid the foundation for cooperation on the subsequent 28nm process.

In the midst of the crisis, calm discussions and unwavering support deepened the revolutionary friendship between the two men - perhaps Huang Renxun will not forget that at the beginning of NVIDIA, he contacted many chip manufacturers who were unwilling to take on orders, and Zhang Zhongmou personally called him, thus establishing a cooperative relationship.

Morris Chang even proposed to Morris Chang that he take over TSMC and become its CEO. In his new book, Morris Chang revealed that he made the proposal twice, but Huang Renxun rejected it both times. When Huang Renxun refused Morris Chang, TSMC’s Market Cap was nearly ten times that of NVIDIA.

It is also on the basis of maintaining a decent relationship network in the past that when NVIDIA reaches the top of the world, those sweet words will not appear too abrupt.

AI is very popular and NVIDIA has become a leader. Musk, for Tesla and his new xAI venture, had dinner with Huang Renxun and begged him to sell more GPUs to himself. And Huang Renxun really did it.

In September this year, Musk announced that Colossus, a supercomputer cluster including 100,000 NVIDIA H100s, has officially gone online, making it the world’s largest in terms of scale. Musk only took 122 days to build this supercomputer.

Thus, Huang Renxun and Musk entered the honeymoon period for the second time, and Huang Renxun called Colossus a ‘miracle’. Recently, Huang Renxun praised Musk as a ‘superman’, while Musk did not stop praising Huang Renxun.

Musk’s ‘miracle’ has become Huang Renxun’s gold-lettered signboard for selling AI chips. After praising Musk, Huang Renxun always adds a few words about the popularity of the AI era and the next generation Blackwell GPU. The latest news shows that Musk’s xAI has placed an order worth $1.08 billion to NVIDIA for GB200.

At the Nvidia Japan Summit in November 2024, Masayoshi Son was invited on stage. Unexpectedly, Jensen Huang mentioned, ‘Mr. Masa, can you imagine what would happen if you became Nvidia’s largest shareholder?’ Upon hearing this, Masayoshi Son hugged Jensen Huang and pretended to cry—thus easily resolving their past awkwardness.

In 2017, SoftBank’s Vision Fund acquisition 4.9% of NVIDIA’s shares, becoming the fourth largest shareholder. In February 2019, under the pressure of the Vision Fund itself and the uncertain future of NVIDIA due to the downturn in Crypto Assets, SoftBank dumped all of NVIDIA’s stocks. This move undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow to NVIDIA, which was deeply mired at the time.

Masayoshi Son and Renxun Huang have maintained a good relationship. Later, Masayoshi Son even proposed to lend money to Renxun Huang for the privatization of NVIDIA. After the acquisition of ARM by SoftBank, Masayoshi Son also tried to sell it to Renxun Huang, but ultimately failed due to antitrust pressure.

Whether to mention or not mention this past seems awkward, but Huang Renxun brought it up on stage, deconstructing it humorously in front of everyone, giving Sun Zhengyi a perfect way out.

Behind the smile of ‘good person’ Huang Renxun, there is no trace of flattery, but a kind of clear and ruthless determination.

Huang Renxun is not without a temper, although he does not engage in public opinion wars, he is not soft in litigation.

In addition to the lawsuit with Microsoft, a typical incident is the head-on collision with Intel. In 2009, Intel sued Nvidia, claiming that the cross-licensing protocol for mutual authorization reached five years ago did not apply to Intel’s next-generation integrated memory controller. In other words, after the cooperation, Intel wanted to abandon Nvidia.

At that time, Huang Renxun turned around and sued Intel as well, and his attitude was firm, not only pointing out that Intel’s actual purpose was to hinder GPU technology, but also claiming in an interview, “Never compromise.” In the end, the lawsuit ended with Intel paying NVIDIA $1.5 billion in patent royalties over 5 years, and Huang Renxun emerged victorious.

But Huang Renxun doesn’t indulge in the pleasure of the mouth.

At the SIGGRAPH conference in July this year, Huang Renxun and Zuckerberg talked on the same stage. During the conversation, Zuckerberg became emotional when talking about Apple: “As soon as Apple’s closed source is mentioned, I get angry!” Later, perhaps getting more and more angry, Zuckerberg even swore, which is rare.

There is no love lost between Huang Renxun and Apple.

Apple computers used Nvidia’s GPU in the early days, but in 2008, there was the Nvidia ‘GPUgate’ incident, where overheating of the graphics card caused machine failures and resulted in losses for partners including Apple. As a result, Apple dropped its trust in Nvidia and chose to develop its own chips at a time when Nvidia was eyeing the mobile phone market. In 2016, Apple completely stopped using Nvidia GPUs.

By 2019, NVIDIA announced that CUDA would no longer support the MacOS operating system. Since then, a long-standing cold war has ensued between Apple and NVIDIA, even being referred to as a “chip cold war” between the two.

In 2024, during the AI arms race, two companies are still competing. While everyone is scrambling for NVIDIA chips, Apple, on the other hand, chooses to use Amazon’s proprietary chip.

However, in the face of Zuckerberg’s criticism of Apple on stage, Huang Renxun did not respond. Instead, he jokingly said, ‘We’re still live now,’ and shifted the topic away from Apple. He neither refuted nor agreed, but remained silent.

He is very clear that there are no permanent frens in the business world, nor are there permanent enemies, so there is no real motivation for who is really “on top”.

Perhaps it is based on this point that Huang Renxun can understand why Sun Zhengyi and Musk once abandoned themselves at a certain Node, and can also refrain from firing at Apple.

And his allies, of course, are well aware that the relationship behind the “good guy” Huang Renxun is dynamic.

In Zhang Zhongmou’s new book, he recalls the past and praises his friendship with Huang Renxun. Huang Renxun is also sending signals to the outside world to consider more cooperation options. When he attended an event hosted by Goldman Sachs in San Francisco in September this year, Huang Renxun said, ‘NVIDIA relies heavily on TSMC to produce its important chips, mainly because TSMC’s technology in wafer manufacturing is far ahead. If necessary, NVIDIA can still make other choices.’

In other words, Huang Renxun admits the possibility of replacing TSMC.

Huang Renxun does not believe that always being light and always being happy is the best. He has a kind of admiration for torture and suffering, and often proclaims that he tells himself every day that the company will go bankrupt in 30 days.

He promised not to lay off employees when tech giants were laying off employees, but when it comes to management, he said, “I don’t think the best jobs are always the ones that bring happiness,” openly admitting that he likes to “torture” employees to enhance their abilities.

Perhaps the relationship is the same for Huang Renxun. The relationship where we are all fine is not worthy of praise. The back-and-forth, the mutual torment, and the mutual benefit are what make it so memorable.

“Good person” Huang Renxun continues to torment temporary enemies and temporary allies with a smile and uncertainty. Watching the fire from the water, at ease.

Reference materials:

1. Silicon Valley 101: ‘The Rise of Nvidia GPUs in Lawsuits and Infamy: The Fight Never Stops, and There is No Forever Frenzy’

2. Yang Jianyong: ‘NVIDIA big dump is sold by Son Zheyi, a $4 billion bet on the dream of AI shattered?’

3. Alphabetical Ranking: ‘Musk Chases Trillion OpenAI’

4. China Entrepreneur Magazine: Jensen Huang: I don’t like layoffs, I’d rather “torture” them