Back when Nvidia was a industry's smallest player, AMD almost bought it. According to the interior, CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang had a deal breaker condition that prevented the merger: He wanted to be CEO of the joint company.
Former AMD engineer Hemant Mohapatra shared a behind-the-scenes look at why an AMD-Nvidia alliance never materialized in a Friday post series in X. Mohapatra worked at AMD for over six years before eventually moving into venture capital.
He wrote that AMD “should have bought Nvidia — and we tried,” but Huang “apparently thought too long-term and was building his 'Apple strategy'” to lock in users.
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“He refused to sell unless he became CEO of the joint venture to align with this strategy,” Mohapatra wrote. “AMD was fired and our future trajectories were forever separated.”
But clearly, someone at AMD saw the future. We saw only part of it. We should have bought Nvidia – and we tried. Nvidia – for those who remember – was mostly a “scratch” CPU for hardcore gamers and they put a lot of effort into CUDA and AMD was a big believer in OpenGL. The developers…
— Hemant Mohapatra (@MohapatraHemant) July 5, 2024
Current AMD engineer Phil Park confirmed Mohapatra's account on Friday, writing: “I have never met Hemant and although there are some things where I have a different opinion, the anecdote about Jensen wanting to be CEO is true.”
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A 2012 Forbes the article further confirms the possible Nvidia-AMD merger and gives it a more concrete time frame.
According to the article, Nvidia almost became part of AMD in 2006 as AMD tried to get ahead of Intel by adding a graphics arm. After Huang wanted to be CEO of the combined technology company, AMD bought Nvidia rival ATI for $5.4 billion in July 2006 instead.
IN time of writingNvidia's market cap of $3.1 trillion is over ten times that of AMD's $288 billion.
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Nvidia “stuck to their guns and the market eventually came to them when AI took off,” Mohapatra wrote. “Most give up, Jensen just kept going harder.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in June 2024. SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images
Nvidia has been making graphics chips for more than 30 years and started working towards AI and deep learning in 2006.
The multi-year, multibillion-dollar effort gave Nvidia a head start in the AI race: Nvidia chips are now the brains of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Nvidia also has over 80% of the AI chip market, although competition is intensifying as some of them the largest technology customers focus on making chips at home.
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