Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 2 hours ago
To break down Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at GTC Taipei, and what his announcements mean for the future of AI and Taiwan, reporter Lily LaMattina speaks to Rolf Bulk, head of semiconductors and infrastructure at the Futurum Group.

Category

🗞
News
Transcript
00:00Hwang Ji, DC's speech was over two hours long, he made a lot of big announcements,
00:04but what would you say is the biggest takeaway in your view?
00:07So, let's first talk about what he did not talk about.
00:10So, no new product announcements in the data center, nothing about Feynman architecture,
00:15which was something that investors did not anticipate, but still.
00:19You know, data center is the major driver for NVIDIA, so to not see any new announcements on that front,
00:24that was something to take note of.
00:26What it mostly took away, though, is that NVIDIA remains very focused on the most important metric for them,
00:33which is tokens per watt.
00:35Over the last year or so, that has really evolved into the metric that investors and the broader industry pay
00:41attention to.
00:42And on that front, NVIDIA is still leading by a mile compared to their competitors.
00:48So, in our estimates, they're, on that metric token per watt, they're three to fifteen times as efficient as an
00:55AMD, for instance.
00:57And this really comes down to the level of integration that NVIDIA can deliver.
01:01So, those seven chips that they combine into the Vera Rubin rack, that drives that level of performance delta.
01:09Another big theme was AI infrastructure, what Huang is calling AI factories, these massive data centers used to run and
01:17train AI models.
01:18But what do you see as the biggest obstacle for scaling these in the next few years?
01:23So, for NVIDIA, but also for all of their peers, what remains a real bottleneck is silicon.
01:28So, whether it is N3, so three nanometer capacity coming out of TSMC,
01:35or high bandwidth memory chips coming from SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron,
01:39all of those chips, all of that silicon is still in short supply.
01:43And this remains the main bottleneck.
01:44Now, for NVIDIA, in particular, that is not necessarily a negative for the industry as a whole.
01:51It smoothens the cycle, ensuring that we don't end up in a situation in which the sector overbuilds
01:58and ends up with a situation where we see a big downturn.
02:03And for NVIDIA, it ensures that buyers really focus on that performance per watt metric.
02:10If your silicon is constrained, if your power is constrained, you're going to want to put in the most efficient
02:16chip.
02:17And that is NVIDIA.
02:18Another big announcement NVIDIA had was it's pushed deeper into the PC market.
02:23Why this move now?
02:25And do you see the PC market becoming a big area for growth for the company in the next few
02:29years?
02:30So, computer access, as you know, has always been fairly PC-centric.
02:35So, they saved that announcement for this particular conference rather than announcing it a few months ago
02:41at their own conference on the West Coast.
02:44At the end of the day, for NVIDIA, PCs is a smaller market compared to the data center.
02:49But the cooperation that they have with Microsoft, with MediaTek, with ARM,
02:53there is a lot of ecosystem backing to this initiative.
02:57And that is something that is probably necessary.
02:59Because in the end, we've had several initiatives over the last decade of PC manufacturers trying to break into ARM
03:07-based Windows PCs.
03:09What NVIDIA is trying to do today.
03:12And all of those have failed.
03:13The only ARM-based alternative that we have in the market is Apple.
03:18Because Apple can so tightly control its ecosystem.
03:22Now, NVIDIA, with all of its peers, tried to deliver a similar proposition today.
03:26But we'll have to see whether they succeed.
03:28And we don't really know yet.
03:31Because what we have not seen is benchmarks versus Intel and AMD.
03:35We haven't seen any type of price point, any type of performance difference.
03:39So, the jury is still out on that front, I would say.
03:41As NVIDIA deepens its presence in Taiwan, which Taiwanese companies, besides TSMC, do you see being able to benefit the
03:48most?
03:49So, obviously, TSMC is the main beneficiary, absolutely.
03:54But apart from that, the ecosystem in Taiwan is very rich.
03:57There are dozens of companies that stand to benefit here.
04:01Chen Sun-Huang mentioned 10% GDP growth, potentially, for Taiwan, which is an astounding figure.
04:06I think companies such as ASC, that do packaging, Foxconn, that does server assembly, those companies stand to benefit.
04:13But there's companies, for instance, such as Kingslide, that do the rails for NVIDIA RX.
04:17And that is something that, it is amazing that the company that manufactures rails that go into racks,
04:22runs gross margins at the similar level of NVIDIA, so in the 70%.
04:27That just really demonstrates that the solutions that companies supply here are very differentiated.
04:32And the market positions that they have in their respective segments can be very strong.
Comments

Recommended