On Wednesday evening, computer chip and software maker Nvidia announced that it had generated revenue of $30 billion in its latest quarter – double the previous year and more than Wall Street’s expectations.
With a market capitalization of three trillion US dollars, Nvidia is now considered one of the most valuable companies in the country after Apple.
Nvidia is the American dream on a grand scale.
Founder Jensen Huang moved to the USA as the child of Taiwanese immigrants.
At the age of 16, he graduated from high school in Oregon and earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
This week, the internet was amazed by Huang’s LinkedIn profile, which states:
- Dishwasher, Busboy, Waiter | Denny’s | 1978–1983
- Founder and CEO | Nvidia | 1993-present
Because there are only two entries.
“This is the most motivating thing I have ever seen,” one commenter remarked to X.
In fact, Huang, who was developing microprocessors at the time, met with some disillusioned Silicon Valley engineers at a Denny’s in East San Jose and decided to start the “next version”: Nvidia.
The original inspiration was to make better chips for video games, which they rightly saw as a lucrative market.
Today, Nvidia’s growth is largely due to its pioneering work in the field of artificial intelligence.
According to Reuters, Nvidia holds about 80 to 95 percent of the global market in AI chip design and software.
To achieve this, Nvidia employees work hard.
As Bloomberg reported this week, some engineers at the Santa Clara, California-based company are working until 2 a.m., seven days a week.
But only a few quit because the pay is very good – anyone who has been at Nvidia for more than five years is almost certainly a millionaire.
“If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy,” Huang told “60 Minutes.”
Quite right. If only politicians thought the same way.
American capitalism has a long history of great risks and great opportunities, but Democrats who want to suppress innovation don’t care.
If it were up to them, they would drive companies like Nvidia into insignificance through regulation and taxation.
The United States has led the computer revolution, the software revolution, the Internet revolution, and now the AI revolution.
But the progressive takeover of government bureaucracy threatens all this.
The excitement may last for a company that is – at least for now – on the cutting edge of this technology, but it doesn’t have to, because that’s how our great economy works.
The best thing the government can do is stay out of the matter.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, the promise behind Nvidia’s rise, I disagree with the doomsayers who fear that the company’s success will be a disaster for the economy.
Why do we need truck drivers when AI technology can be used to deliver goods to people’s homes cost-effectively and efficiently using a self-driving AI car?
Will AI replace all humans and leave us with no jobs?
All legitimate concerns that I have experienced first-hand. I grew up in Westchester.
Friends of mine worked at the GM plant in Tarrytown because it was a good blue-collar job that didn’t require a college degree.
When the plant closed in the early 1990s, I could still remember how many lives were destroyed as a result.
But it also forced people to redesign their lives and go where the money is.
Assembly line workers became mechanics or went back to school to learn a skill that would benefit them in the information economy.
I remember when I covered the dot-com bubble in the 1990s.
The doomsayers predicted that the dotcoms would destroy large parts of the economy.
When the bubble burst, the exact opposite happened.
Many of the dotcoms (remember Pets.com?) crashed and went bankrupt,
Amazon survived, Google and Facebook were created from the rubble of the bubble, a new economy emerged, many millions of jobs were created and many millionaires and billionaires who pay taxes and start companies that employ workers.
The apocalypse did not happen; our economy became more innovative and created new and better jobs.
If history is anything to go by, the AI will follow the same path.
So be proud of it.
