Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, with his trademark black leather jacket, has arguably been the hottest tech CEO in the past year as companies around the world race to acquire the Nvidia chips that are pivotal to powering today’s AI revolution.
But the picture was a little different just a little under a decade ago. Huang revealed at Nvidia’s AI Summit in Tokyo on Wednesday that Masayoshi Son, the Japanese billionaire tech entrepreneur and founder of Softbank, offered to help him buy out Nvidia back then.
“Masa said, ‘Jensen, the market doesn’t understand the value of Nvidia. Your future is incredible’,” Huang said on stage at a fireside chat with Son. “‘Your journey of suffering will continue for some time, so let me give you the money to buy Nvidia.’ He wanted to lend me money to buy Nvidia, all of it. Now I regret not taking it.”
Both men revealed that the conversation about buying Nvidia occurred a month after Son’s Softbank took Arm Holdings, the U.K.-based chip designer, private in a $32 billion deal. Softbank took Arm Holdings public again last year.
“We talked about combining those two companies [Nvidia and Arm Holdings],” Huang said.
As the founder and CEO of Softbank, a Japanese investment holding firm, Masayoshi Son is known for making big bets. He was an early investor in Jack Ma’s Alibaba and was also an early investor in Nvidia. Son once owned 5% in Nvidia but dumped his entire stake more than five years ago when it was worth less than $4 billion. That stake would have been worth around $178 billion today.
New collaborations
While Son may not have a stake in Nvidia anymore, the two companies announced collaborations on a series of AI endeavors in Japan.
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Softbank’s telecom unit will receive Nvidia’s latest chips, made using the Blackwell design, to build a supercomputer as Son tries to ride the AI boom. Besides the supercomputer, Softbank will also be using Nvidia chips to provide AI services over cellular networks. These networks, known by the industry as artificial intelligence radio access networks, or AI-RAN, are expected to be better suited for applications like autonomous vehicle remote support and robotics control.
“We’re going to buy a lot of your chips,” Son said.
Japan and AI
Son also said that there’s “no handicap” and that the Japanese government is not getting in the way of companies trying to ride the AI revolution.
Japan was once a leader in sectors like consumer electronics and even the semiconductor industry, but fell behind through a combination of changing market trends and rise of new market competition.
“I think in the last three decades as the software industries flourished in the West and China, Japan could have been more aggressive,” Huang said.
But in recent years, the Japanese government has tried to reestablish its position in the tech industry.
On Monday, the Japanese government said it was pledging some $65 billion in additional support for the country’s semiconductor and AI sectors. The money is in addition to the 4 trillion yen ($26 billion) the government has already allocated to bolster Japan’s chip industry, which includes an ambitious bet on Rapidus, a chip venture that the government hopes will put Japan back at the forefront of the chip industry.
