Jensen Huang risked Nvidia on 1 unmade chip with 6 months left
Jensen Huang, the head of Nvidia, bet his last dollars on an unmade chip.
The short version
- Nvidia had six months of cash left when he ordered mass production.
- The RIVA 128 chip saved Nvidia from going out of business in 1997.
- It sold a million units in its first four months.
In 1997, Jensen Huang, the head of Nvidia, made a desperate gamble that saved his company from insolvency. Nvidia, the chip designer now worth trillions, was mere weeks away from hitting the wall with about six months of cash left. According to Yahoo Finance, Huang ordered mass production of the RIVA 128 graphics chip before it physically existed, testing the entire design inside a simulator.
Normal chipmakers build a prototype, test it, and fix bugs over several rounds, but Nvidia could not afford the time or money. When engineers asked how he knew the unmade chip would work, Huang gave a stark answer. "I know it's going to be perfect because if it's not We'll be out of business," Huang said.
To fund the gamble, Nvidia cut its staff from about 100 to 40, surviving only on a $5 million investment from Sega, the Japanese game maker. The finished chip supported only eight of the 32 blend modes in Microsoft's DirectX spec, forcing Nvidia to persuade game developers to work around the limits.
By August 1997, when the RIVA 128 finally shipped, Nvidia had just one month of payroll left. The chip sold roughly a million units in its first four months, driving the company toward its 1999 IPO and laying the groundwork for today's AI boom.
Huang later turned that level of desperation into an internal motto. "Our company is thirty days from going out of business," Huang often told his team.
Photo: Anderseidesvik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, edited
