Nvidia Huang Renxun: Epidemic control affects demand for graphics cards, and there are signs of easing supply tensions

May 28 news, yesterday, NVIDIA (NVIDIA) CEO Huang Renxun conducted an online video exchange with the media. He shared his observations on changes in chip supply shortages, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and pessimism in the market, as well as Nvidia’s corresponding countermeasures.

In response to the shortage of chips, Huang Renxun said that in order to allow GeForce graphics card players to use GPUs, Nvidia is working hard to increase the supply, which is very challenging. Nvidia is also working on new features that reduce GPU hash rate to prevent miners from using GPUs to mine.

Why is GPU demand so high? Huang Renxun analyzed several reasons: one reason is that many people stay at home, and playing games has become one of the popular entertainment methods; another reason is that the creative market has expanded, and more people have become creative artists and art content creators. As more “home offices” emerge, a family may need more than one PC. These factors have created huge demand for GPUs.

He said that due to the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the control of the epidemic in China, NVIDIA’s end market demand and supply chain for GeForce consumer products in China and Russia have suffered from challenges brought about by changes in the external environment.

“China is a very important market and a very important source of our supply chain.” He said that China is very important to every technology company. China is the center of the world’s supply chain, and its closed influence is huge, but he Temporary lockdowns are very much in favor, because it’s for people’s safety. He believes that Shenzhen’s success in epidemic control will be replicated in Shanghai.

Nvidia’s operations team has been working around the clock, and the weakening of demand from external factors has eased the tight supply of products such as Nvidia graphics cards to a certain extent. In the past few weeks, market demand has declined in various forms. He is confident that when markets reopen, demand will return and supply chains will return to normal: “We’ve seen demand slow in many ways over the past few weeks, which has helped supply in the channel to return to normal.”

“We have to maintain a high level of vigilance, we want to make sure to keep a close eye on the channels and inventory levels,” Huang Renxun stressed.

In addition, he mentioned that Nvidia is also facing labor shortages. “Currently, the number of chip designers, chip architects, and AI chip designers in the world is very small.” Huang Renxun said, “We are very lucky and may be the world’s largest company focused on artificial intelligence computing. Even so, we are also There are not enough people.”

“So our answer is to use artificial intelligence to design our chips.” He gave some examples. In complex mathematical and arithmetic operations, artificial intelligence can do better, and artificial intelligence can be used to layout and simulate chips. , and estimate the power of the chip.

When it comes to autonomous driving, Huang Renxun said that its strategy is to help any company that wants to automate the system, there are two different business models, one is to sell chips, servers or other things, and the other is to cooperate with companies to develop fleets, And provide lifetime support for the team.

He also shared his views on the old chip giant Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of virtual machine giant and cloud computing company VMware: “As long as their intention is to innovate, invest and develop new technologies, this is good for the industry.”

Over the past two decades, NVIDIA has pioneered many unique things, from proposing the concept of GPU, to building the world’s first successful parallel computing architecture CUDA, to seizing the rise of deep learning and becoming an artificial intelligence computing enterprise. The top spot, as well as designing processors for all kinds of robots. From NVIDIA’s development history, we can see so clearly how technological innovation has the power to change the world.

Looking to the future, Huang Renxun is very enthusiastic and optimistic about the development of artificial intelligence: “The intelligent application of artificial intelligence realizes automation and brings productivity to many different fields. Our work in artificial intelligence has undergone revolutionary changes.”