Jensen Huang showed up on Joe Rogan's podcast and dropped a story about how nobody wanted NVIDIA's first DGX-1 AI system back when they launched it. The CEO said Elon Musk was literally the only person who stepped up to buy one, and Jensen personally drove the machine to San Francisco to deliver it to OpenAI in 2016.
At the time, the tech world was still stuck on CPU-based computing, so the AI-focused hardware didn't get any traction. Elon basically validated NVIDIA's whole compute strategy before anyone else saw where things were heading.
The company went from zero purchase orders on that first system to dealing with massive demand for everything from Ampere to Blackwell chips, and they're already prepping the Vera Rubin lineup for next year.
At the time, the tech world was still stuck on CPU-based computing, so the AI-focused hardware didn't get any traction. Elon basically validated NVIDIA's whole compute strategy before anyone else saw where things were heading.
The company went from zero purchase orders on that first system to dealing with massive demand for everything from Ampere to Blackwell chips, and they're already prepping the Vera Rubin lineup for next year.
