"Good guy" Huang Renxun is at ease watching the fire in the water

Source: Alphabet List

When Huang Renxun was 8 years old, he jumped into the sea of ​​fire.

He poured gasoline into the swimming pool, ignited it, and then jumped in. Oil is lighter than water. There was already a flame on the surface of the water, but it was still quiet under the water.

Many years later, Huang Renxun recalled the feeling of looking up at the fire underwater at that time, and he still felt unsatisfied: "It's so beautiful..."

This is not just a fragment of childhood memory. Water and fire coexist, and watching fire in water has almost become a metaphor for Huang Renxun's life.

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

Musk can't stand Ultraman, and he has taken OpenAI to court again and again, describing the other party as a "devil".

Zuckerberg is still resentful of Apple. While leading Meta to attack the open source big model, he also criticized Apple's closedness. When the "feelings" were strong, he rarely swore on the stage.

The situation in China is not peaceful either. Recently, Zhu Xiaohu's attack on Zhang Yutong of The Dark Side of the Moon is still fermenting. In his circle of friends, Zhu Xiaohu angrily said that he would not tolerate "breach of fiduciary responsibility" and "breach of business ethics and even laws", and his words were not light.

Amidst all the disturbances, Huang Renxun seemed like a complete old "good guy".

He and Masayoshi Son were on the same stage, revealing past scars, and mentioned that Masayoshi Son was once the largest shareholder of Nvidia, but the atmosphere was quite relaxed. Although Softbank sold all of Nvidia's shares that year, it was a heavy blow at the bottom.

He was on the same stage with Zuckerberg, and the latter was emotional when talking about Apple. He used a joke to resolve it and did not respond. Although Nvidia and Apple have many grievances.

He and Musk started boasting mode, he praised Musk as "superman", and Musk praised him on X every now and then. Although no one will forget that Tesla's self-developed chip stabbed Nvidia hard a few years ago.

Not to mention his relationship with chip manufacturers in Taiwan, China. Due to tight chip production capacity, Huang Renxun went to Taiwan several times and was photographed buying pineapples in Minnan dialect. In addition, Huang Renxun also appeared in Hong Kong at the end of last month. In the group photo circulating on the Internet, Huang Renxun and a group of key figures raised beer glasses at a food stall in Sham Shui Po.

Watching fire in the water, it won't burn a bit.

Huang Renxun is now in the role of a winner, and of course he doesn't need to get angry with anyone. In the days when chips are hard to come by, technology giants are trying their best to get along with him.

But looking back, it is not difficult to find that even when Huang Renxun was not at the top, even in the fierce battle, even if there was a chance of accidental firing, he almost never really caused himself personal grudges. He is very good at keeping things to himself, and he is also very good at discussing things objectively.

This makes him have two personalities at the same time: on the one hand, Huang Renxun's "combativeness" is obvious to all, and he is even called "the most willful Party B". The most exaggerated thing is that he went to court with Party A Microsoft in 2002 because he was unwilling to lower the price. On the other hand, in the public eye, he is either calm and composed, or smiling and joking, or making trouble, but he is never seen angry.

Such characteristics are not uncommon in professional managers, such as the current Apple CEO Cook, or Microsoft CEO Nadella. But it is rare for founders, and the closest person in the technology industry is probably Lei Jun.

Combative and "good guy", these two personalities are intertwined in Huang Renxun. The reason why the word "good guy" needs to be put in double quotes is because behind the image of a "good guy" is actually a kind of ruthlessness that is not affected by emotions.

Huang Renxun had an experience in his childhood that is often talked about:

When he was about 9 years old, Huang Renxun was sent to the United States by his parents, but by mistake he was arranged to go to a special school. There were many problem students in the school. His roommate was 17 years old and could see multiple scars left by stabs when he took off his clothes.

Huang Renxun was not only the youngest, but also the only Chinese (or Asian). But he was good at studying, and problem students also had the need to read and recognize words. So Huang Renxun tutored others, and his roommate took good care of him, so no one bothered him anymore.

Neither becoming "them" nor wandering around, Huang Renxun integrated into the new environment in a special way.There were still some superficial behaviors of getting close, such as learning to smoke, but other than that, he was still the child who studied hard. In the past, the outside world always described Huang Renxun's growth experience as "a little gangster in a hot-blooded high school when he was a child", which is inaccurate.

Blending in like a chameleon has become a superpower of Huang Renxun.

In 2013, Huang Renxun and Lei Jun were on the same stage at the Beijing National Convention Center. Huang Renxun stood next to Lei Jun and shouted in Chinese: "I am also a Mi fan!"

At that time, Nvidia had entered the mobile market with the Tegra series of chips for several years, but it had always been at a disadvantage in the competition with Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Intel.

Huang Renxun wanted to conquer the mobile market and further open up the situation in the Chinese market, so Huang Renxun set his sights on Xiaomi, which had only been established for three years and had risen like a dark horse. That year, Xiaomi's valuation had reached tens of billions of US dollars, higher than Nvidia's market value.

Beijing, China, Xiaomi, Lei Jun, Huang Renxun ran up to the stage and said "Hello everyone" and "I am also a Mi fan". At that time, Xiaomi represented the feelings of enthusiasts, which immediately ignited the enthusiasm of the audience. In fact, Huang Renxun spoke poor Chinese throughout the few minutes of sales promotion, and from time to time he hugged Lei Jun, who was 6 years younger than him. The audience was very supportive. When Huang Renxun said "the best GPU", someone in the audience shouted "no one".

In fact, the cooperation between Xiaomi and NVIDIA did not last long. The market response of 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 were on the same stage, which helped NVIDIA open up the minds of consumers in the Chinese market and also allowed Huang Renxun to find the way to cooperate with local companies. In the following years, Huang Renxun led NVIDIA to cooperate with giants such as Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba in cloud computing, autonomous driving, and other fields, and made in-depth layout in the Chinese market.

There are many more famous scenes like this.

Also in 2024, we can see a variety of Huang Renxun:

When Huang Renxun held a press conference in the United States, he spoke fluent English and elaborated on the technical details. Behind him, Wall Street's burning eyes.

When attending Nvidia's annual meeting in China, Huang Renxun wore a large flowered jacket from Northeast China and danced on the stage with a red handkerchief. Behind him, the US chip ban blocked Nvidia's most advanced AI chips from entering China.

When Huang Renxun went to Hong Kong, China, he drank beer with everyone at a food stall; when he went to Taiwan, he was photographed buying pineapples in Minnan dialect, and even when he and Liang Jianhou were on the same stage in Taiwan, they had to perform a skit in Minnan dialect to promote chips. Behind this is the strong binding relationship between Huang Renxun and Taiwan chip manufacturers, as well as the bottleneck of production capacity when the supply of chips exceeds the demand.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Huang Renxun is "good at both office and kitchen".

Huang Renxun was also on the verge of a conflict, but he is very good at two things: keeping it to himself and discussing the issue at hand, so as not to let the friction ferment in the public opinion field.

After the setback in the mobile market, Huang Renxun turned around and announced his withdrawal in 2014. He then turned his direction to the automotive autonomous driving industry.

No need to guess, Huang Renxun inevitably got close to Musk at this time. The two interacted more and more. At Nvidia's annual GTC conference in 2015, Huang Renxun also invited Musk to the stage for a nearly half-hour conversation.

In 2017, Tesla's Model 3 began to be delivered. Model 3, as well as the previous Model S and Model X, were all equipped with Nvidia Drive PX2 chips.

Musk and Huang Renxun ushered in a honeymoon period. Also in 2016, when OpenAI was first founded, Nvidia presented a big gift, the first supercomputer DGX-1 equipped with 8 GPUs. To show his sincerity, Huang Renxun personally delivered the supercomputer to the OpenAI office and wrote his blessings on the chassis. Afterwards, people present signed on the chassis one after another, including Musk and technical backbones, as well as OpenAI interns.

However, this honeymoon period ended with Tesla's announcement of self-developed chips in 2018.

Musk not only claimed that Tesla's chip was a "self-developed chip for fully autonomous driving" and "the best in the world", but also compared it with Nvidia's Drive Xavier chip, crushing the latter's 30 trillion operations per second at 144 trillion operations per second.

This was a moment when Huang Renxun was severely "stabbed in the back", and it was also a node that was infinitely close to an accidental discharge.

But he chose to deal with it coldly and not confront Musk directly. Nvidia issued a statement in the name of the company in response to this matter. The title was "Tesla Raises the Bar for Self-Driving Car Manufacturers". It first expressed congratulations and praise, and then said that there were "some inaccuracies" in Tesla's statement that "needed to be corrected".

The statement stated that it was meaningless to compare the performance of Tesla's dual-chip autonomous driving computer with Nvidia's single-chip driver assistance system. If a comparison is to be made, it should be compared with Nvidia's Drive AGX Pegasus computer, which runs at 320 trillion operations per second.

Seeing Huang Renxun's restrained statement, Musk also "quit while he was ahead".

Later, in Tesla's second quarter earnings conference call that year, facing analysts' questions, Huang Renxun stated that if Tesla's self-developed chip project fails in the future, Nvidia would "be happy" to help. Musk responded politely on Twitter, praising "Nvidia has developed great hardware, and I respect Nvidia and Huang Renxun very much."

Huang Renxun is very skilled in using a matter-of-fact attitude to shut others up. In 2017, Google published a paper on the details of TPU, saying that "TPU processing speed is 15 to 30 times faster than current GPUs and CPUs."

In response, Huang Renxun chose to write an article himself, expand the comparison data, and attach a performance comparison chart. His attitude was strong, but the controversy was quickly calmed down.

The same moment of almost accidentally firing also happened between Huang Renxun and Morris Chang.

Just last week, on November 29, the second volume of TSMC founder Morris Chang's autobiography was officially published. It talks about TSMC's 40nm chip crisis.

In 2008, TSMC mass-produced the 40nm process and quickly locked in major customers such as Nvidia and AMD. But more than a year after production, TSMC's 40nm chips were in trouble with low yields. According to the normal progress, the yield rate should reach more than 90% after the new process is put into production for about a year to meet the supply requirements, but this time the yield rate of 40nm is only about 50%.

In 2009, Morris Chang was reappointed as TSMC CEO. During the call, Huang Renxun emphasized that this unsolved case needed to be solved urgently. Morris Chang then rushed to Huang Renxun's home, and after having a relaxed and casual "pizza dinner" with Huang Renxun and his family, the two began to communicate. Morris Chang proposed a settlement proposal of hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, and Huang Renxun agreed. Within 48 hours, the crisis was resolved.

Under Morris Chang's compensation, Huang Renxun still firmly chose TSMC's 40nm process and laid the foundation for the subsequent cooperation on 28nm process.

The calm discussion and perseverance in the crisis deepened the revolutionary friendship between the two - perhaps Huang Renxun will not forget that in the early stages of Nvidia, he contacted many chip manufacturers but no one was willing to take orders, and Morris Chang personally called him and established a cooperative relationship.

Mr. Chang even proposed to Huang Renxun that he take over TSMC and serve as CEO. In the new book, Morris Chang revealed that he proposed twice and Huang Renxun refused twice. When Huang Renxun rejected Morris Chang, TSMC's market value was nearly ten times that of Nvidia.

It was also on the basis of maintaining a decent network of relationships in the past that those sweet words would not seem too abrupt when Nvidia stood on the top of the world.

AI is hot, and Nvidia has become the upper hand. Musk had dinner with Huang Renxun for Tesla and the newly founded xAI, begging Huang Renxun to sell him more GPUs. Huang Renxun really did it.

In September this year, Musk announced that the supercomputing cluster Colossus, which contains 100,000 NVIDIA H100s, has been officially launched, ranking first in the world in terms of scale. And it took Musk only 122 days to build this supercomputer.

As a result, 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" again, and Musk praised Huang Renxun non-stop.

Musk's "miracle" has become Huang Renxun's golden signboard for selling AI chips. After praising Musk, Huang Renxun always has to add a few words about the AI ​​era and the popularity of the next-generation Blackwell GPU. The latest news shows that Musk's xAI has issued a GB200 order worth US$1.08 billion to Nvidia.

At the 2024 Nvidia Japan Summit in November, Masayoshi Son was invited to the stage. Huang Renxun suddenly mentioned: "Mr. Masa, can you imagine what would happen if you became the largest shareholder of Nvidia?" Upon hearing this, Masayoshi Son hugged Huang Renxun and pretended to cry - the embarrassment of the past was easily resolved.

In 2017, SoftBank's Vision Fund acquired 4.9% of Nvidia's shares and became the fourth largest shareholder. In February 2019, under pressure from the Vision Fund itself and Nvidia's unclear prospects due to the decline of cryptocurrencies, SoftBank sold all of Nvidia's shares. This move was undoubtedly a heavy blow to Nvidia, which was in a quagmire at the time.

Masayoshi Son and Huang Renxun have always maintained a good relationship, and Son later proposed to lend money to Huang Renxun to privatize Nvidia. After SoftBank acquired Arm, Son also tried to sell it to Huang Renxun, but ultimately failed due to antitrust pressure.

Whether this past event is mentioned or not, it seems awkward, but Huang Renxun took it to the stage and explained it with humor in front of everyone, giving Son a perfect step.

Behind the smile of the "good guy" Huang Renxun, there is no flattering background, but a sober ruthlessness.

Huang Renxun is not without 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 event is the head-on confrontation with Intel. In 2009, Intel sued Nvidia, claiming that the patent cross-licensing agreement reached between the two five years ago for mutual authorization does not apply to Intel's next-generation integrated memory controller. In other words, after the cooperation, Intel is going to abandon Nvidia.

At that time, Huang Renxun sued Intel, and his attitude was firm. He not only pointed out that Intel's actual purpose was to hinder GPU technology, but also claimed in the interview that "there would be no settlement". In the end, the lawsuit was settled on the condition that Intel paid Nvidia $1.5 billion in patent royalties within 5 years, and Huang Renxun won a big victory.

But Huang Renxun would not do such things as talking too much.

At the SIGGRAPH conference in July this year, Huang Renxun and Zuckerberg talked on the same stage. During the conversation, Zuckerberg talked about Apple and became emotional for a while: "I get angry when I mention Apple's closed source!" Then, perhaps because he was getting more and more angry, Zuckerberg even swore rarely.

There are grievances between Huang Renxun and Apple.

Apple computers used Nvidia's GPU in the early days, but in 2008, Nvidia's "graphics card door" incident occurred. The graphics card overheated and caused the machine to malfunction, which directly caused losses to partners including Apple. Afterwards, Apple's trust in Nvidia decreased, and when Nvidia was eyeing the mobile phone market, it chose to develop its own chips. And in 2016, Nvidia GPUs were completely discontinued.

By 2019, Nvidia announced that CUDA no longer supports the MacOS operating system. Since then, Apple and Nvidia have entered a long cold war, and it has even been called the "chip cold war" between the two.

The time has come to 2024, and the two companies are still competing in the AI ​​arms race. While everyone is scrambling for Nvidia chips, Apple has chosen to use Amazon's proprietary chips.

However, facing Zuckerberg who criticized Apple on the stage, Huang Renxun did not take over. Instead, he joked that "it's still live now", and then moved the topic away from Apple. There was no rebuttal or agreement, just keeping it to himself.

He knew very well that there were no eternal friends or eternal enemies in the business world, and there was no motivation to really "get on top" with anyone.

Perhaps it is precisely based on this point that Huang Renxun can understand the decision of Sun Zhengyi and Musk to abandon him at a certain point, and can also resist firing at Apple.

And his allies, of course, know that behind the "good guy" Huang Renxun, the relationship is dynamic.

In Morris Chang's new book, he recalls the past and praises his friendship with Huang Renxun. Huang Renxun is also sending a signal to the outside world that he is considering more partners. At an event held by Goldman Sachs in San Francisco in September this year, Huang Renxun said: "Nvidia relies heavily on TSMC to produce the company's important chips, mainly because TSMC's technology in the field of wafer manufacturing is far ahead. If necessary, Nvidia can still make other choices."

In other words, Huang Renxun admitted that there is a possibility of replacing TSMC.

Huang Renxun does not believe that being always light and always happy is the best. He has an almost worship of torture and suffering, and often claims that he tells himself every day that the company will go bankrupt in 30 days.

When tech giants were laying off employees, he promised not to do so. But when it came to management, he said, "I don't think the best jobs are those that always bring happiness." He said frankly that he likes to "torture" employees to enhance their abilities.

Perhaps relationships are the same for Huang Renxun. A relationship that is always good for you, me, and everyone is good is not worthy of praise. The relationship between you and me, and the mutual benefit between tormenting each other, is what is memorable.

"Good guy" Huang Renxun continues to torture temporary enemies and temporary allies with smiles and uncertainty. Watching fire in the water is so comfortable.

References:

1. Silicon Valley 101: "Nvidia GPU Rises in Lawsuits and Infamy: Never Stopped Fighting, No Eternal Friends"

2. Yang Jianyong: "Nvidia's stock price plummeted and was sold off by Masayoshi Son. Is the $4 billion AI dream shattered? 》

3. Alphabet List: "Musk pursues trillion-dollar OpenAI"

4. China Entrepreneur Magazine: "Huang Renxun: I don't like layoffs, I would rather "torture" them