Again when Nvidia was a smaller trade participant, AMD nearly purchased it. Based on insiders, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a deal-breaking situation that prevented the merger: He needed to be CEO of the joint firm.
Former AMD engineer Hemant Mohapatra shared a behind-the-scenes look into why an AMD-Nvidia alliance by no means got here to fruition in a sequence of Friday posts on X. Mohapatra labored at AMD for over six years earlier than ultimately transferring into enterprise capital.
He wrote that AMD “ought to have acquired Nvidia ā and we tried,” however Huang “clearly thought very long run and was constructing his ‘Apple technique'” of locking in customers.
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“He refused to promote except he was made the joint firm’s CEO to align with this technique,” Mohapatra wrote. “AMD blinked and our future trajectories splintered without end.”
However clearly, somebody at AMD noticed the long run. We simply noticed it partially. We should always have acquired Nvidia – and we tried. Nvidia ā for individuals who bear in mind ā was principally a “area of interest” CPU for hardcore players and so they went arduous on CUDA and AMD was an enormous believer in OpenGL. Buildersā¦
ā Hemant Mohapatra (@MohapatraHemant) July 5, 2024
Present AMD engineer Phil Park confirmed Mohapatra’s account on Friday, writing, “I’ve by no means met Hemant, and although there are some things the place I’ve a special opinion, the anecdote about Jensen desirous to be CEO is true.”
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A 2012 Forbes article additional confirms the potential Nvidia-AMD merger and offers it extra of a concrete time-frame.
Based on the piece, Nvidia nearly turned a part of AMD in 2006 as AMD tried to get forward of Intel by including a graphics arm. After Huang needed to be CEO of the mixed tech firm, AMD acquired Nvidia’s rival ATI for $5.4 billion in July 2006 as a substitute.
On the time of writing, Nvidia’s $3.1 trillion market cap is over ten instances greater than AMD’s $288 billion.
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Nvidia “caught to their weapons, and the market got here to them ultimately when AI took off,” Mohapatra wrote. “Most quit, Jensen simply stored going more durable.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in June 2024. SAM YEH/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
Nvidia has been making graphics chips for greater than 30 years and began working in direction of AI and deep studying in 2006.
The multi-year, multi-billion greenback effort gave Nvidia a head begin within the AI race: Nvidia’s chips at the moment are the brains of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Nvidia additionally has over 80% of the AI chip market, although competitors is intensifying as a few of its greatest tech purchasers deal with making chips in-house.
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