Jensen Huang: The Core of NVIDIA — Strength Is Using a Decade of Wisdom and Effort to Wait for the Wind

I recently finished reading Jensen Huang: The Core of NVIDIA. Reading through the entire book, what touched me most wasn't NVIDIA's multi-trillion-dollar market cap today, but Jensen's perseverance, vision, and rationality throughout this journey. It made me deeply appreciate that in the world of technology, so-called strength is actually the perfect combination of effort + wisdom + luck.

The story starts from his childhood, immigrating to the US at a young age, working hard to fit into an unfamiliar environment and overcoming cultural shock. This experience forged his unbreakable mindset of "never letting anything defeat him." In NVIDIA's early days, from struggling with 3D graphics chips to finally establishing a foothold in the gaming market, he never stayed inside his comfort zone.

What I admire most was his massive gamble on the CUDA ecosystem. At the time, GPUs were primarily used for playing video games, but he foresaw the potential of general-purpose computing (GPGPU) and insisted on embedding CUDA architecture into every graphics card. Even though it burned hundreds of millions of dollars annually, caused stock prices to tumble, and drew skepticism from Wall Street for "wasting money," he stubbornly defended this strategy. It wasn't until 2012, when AlexNet emerged and a dormant neural network crushed traditional hand-crafted feature algorithms in one fell swoop, that the world suddenly realized: Jensen Huang had already laid the infrastructure for AI ten years prior. What looked like a fortunate knock on the door was actually using over a decade of wisdom and effort to wait for the wind of an era to blow.

Another hugely insightful point was how NVIDIA handled the windfall profits from Bitcoin mining. Although NVIDIA earned hot money with the trend, he never redefined the company as a mere mining hardware provider; the core resources were strictly guarded for data centers and the AI ecosystem. Maintaining strategic focus and rationality in the face of temptation is truly extraordinary.

After reading Jensen's story, I truly believe that success is never accidental. Effort helped him survive the startup's valley of death, wisdom empowered him to bet everything when no one was watching, and when the wave of luck from neural networks arrived, NVIDIA had already built the world's most powerful aircraft carrier.