Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Is on Top of the World. So Why Is He Worried?
Nvidia’s CEO, mindful of the downfall of onetime hardware giants like Cisco, is aggressively pushing his company into software and cloud services, putting it in competition with its biggest customers.
Around Christmas last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called a series of meetings with company executives to discuss a growing concern: whether Nvidia’s biggest customers were going to run out of data center space to install its artificial intelligence chips, which could hurt sales, according to someone who attended the meetings.
Huang told colleagues he was worried cloud server providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which collectively have been buying about half of Nvidia’s AI server chips in recent quarters, weren’t moving fast enough to set up new data centers and power sources to accommodate the chips they had ordered, known as graphics processing units. After the meetings, Nvidia managers stepped up their pace of asking cloud providers whether they had enough space and electricity to accommodate their orders, according to an employee at Nvidia and several customers and data center operators.