Wow. Classic Jensen style, he ended the Nvidia vs. custom ASIC competition for good. š«”
The level of confidence with which he explains. šÆ
He was answering to UBS research analyst question on how custom ASICs will affect NVIDIA or how they are going to compete with custom ASIC.
Basically he says -
Your custom chip is a science project in a world where NVIDIA is building revenue-generating AI factories.
While the competition is still desperately trying to copy Nvidia's last generation, their roadmap is already at the limits of physics.
They don't just sell silicon; they deliver the entire, impossibly complex platform that the industry has already surrendered to and standardized on. When you must bet hundreds of billions on your company's future, there is no alternativeāthey are the only platform to build on, and everyone knows it.
Full transcript below.
Question by the Analyst -
"Jensen, I wanted to ask about customer ASIC. And I ask because if, you know, we listen to some of the same CSPs that you put up on that slide, and we listen to some of the companies who are making custom ASICs, some of the deployment numbers sound pretty big. So, I wanted to just hear your position, how you're going to compete with custom ASICs, how they can possibly compete with you, and maybe how some of your conversations with these same customers would sort of form your view in terms of how competitive custom ASIC will be to you."
Jensen's response
"First of all, just because something gets built doesn't mean it's great. Number two, if it's not great, all of those companies are run by great CEOs who are really good at math. And because these are AI factories, it affects your revenues, not just your costs. It affects your revenues, not just your cost. It's a different calculus.
Every company only has so much power. You just have to ask them. Every single company only has so much power, and within that power, you have to maximize your revenues, not just your cost. So this is a new game. This is not a data center game, this is an AI factory game. So when the time comes, that simple calculus, as I was using yesterday, that simple math that I was showing yesterday, still has to be done. Which is the reason why so many projects are started and so many are not taken into production.
Because there's always another alternative. We are the other alternative, and that alternative is excellent. Not normal excellent, as you know. Everybody's still trying to catch up to Hopper. I haven't seen a competitor to Hopper yet. And here we're talking about 40x more.
And so our roadmap is at the limits of what's possible. Not to mention we're really good at it and completely dedicated to it. A lot of people have a lot of businesses to do. I've got this one business to do. And we're all in on this. 35,000 people doing one job. Been doing it for a long time.
The depth of capability, the scope of technology, as you saw yesterday, is pretty incredible. And it's not about building a chip; it's building an AI factory. We're talking about scale up, scale out. We're talking about networking and switches and software. We're talking about systems, and these system architectures are insane.
Even the systems themselves. Notice, 100% of the computer industry, 100% of the computer industry has standardized on NVIDIA's system. Why? Because try to build an alternative. Building the alternative is not even thinkable because look at how much investment we put into building this one. And so even the system's hard. What people used to think, system is just sheet metal. Hardly sheet metal. 600,000 parts, it's hardly sheet metal.
And so all of the technology is hard. We're pushing every single dimension to the limit because we're talking about so much money. The world is going to lay down hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the next just a couple of two, three years.
Let's do the thought experiment. Let's say you want to stand up a data center and you want it to be fully operational in two years' time. When do you have to place the PO on that? Today. So let's suppose you have to place a hundred billion dollar PO on something. What architecture would you place it on, literally based on everything you have today? There's only one.
You can't reasonably build out giant infrastructures with hundreds of billions of dollars behind it, hoping to turn it back on and to get the ROIC on it, unless you have the confidence that we are able to provide you. And we can provide you complete confidence. And singularly so.
We're the only technology company where if I had to go place a hundred billion dollars on an AI factory... Oh, that's interesting, I did. Literally the only company who's willing to place hundred billion dollar POs across the industry to go build it out. And you guys know, that's our, that's the depth of our supply chain. And we are, and we have. Give me another. Give me another one that has that depth and that length.
And now to the point where we've got to go and work with the supply chain upstream and downstream to prepare the world for hundreds of billions of dollars working towards trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure build-out. Our partnerships with power companies and all of the cooling companies, the Vertivs, the Schneiders, our partnerships with BlackRock... The partnership network necessary to prepare the world to go build out trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure, that's undergoing as we speak. What architecture and what ASIC chip do you go select? That doesn't even make sense. It's a weird conversation even.
And so, I think that one, the game is quite large. The investment level, therefore the risk level, is quite high. And so the certainty that you're selecting the best is quite important. And the certainty that you can execute, vital.
We are the company you can build on top of. We're the company, we're the platform that you can build your AI infrastructure on. And we're the company that you can build your AI infrastructure strategy on. And so, I think it includes chips, but it's much, much more than that."
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From 'GTC Financial Analyst Q&A' session (full link in comment)