Jensen Huang

of that gpu which is a consumer product so tremendously it it completely consumed all of the company's gross profit dollars and so at the time the company was probably you know worth i don't know at the time eight was it like eight billion dollars or something six seven billion dollars or something like that after we launched cuda

I recognized that it was going to add so much cost, but it was something we believed in.

You know, our market cap went down to like $1.5 billion.

And so we were down there for a while, and we clawed our way back slowly.

But we carried CUDA on GeForce.

I always say that NVIDIA is the house that GeForce built.

Because it was GeForce that took CUDA out to everybody.

Researchers, scientists, they discovered CUDA on GeForce because they were all, you know, many of them were gamers.

Many of them built their own PCs anyways.

In a university lab, many of them built clusters themselves, you know, using PC components.

And so that, you know, that's kind of how we got going.

That was also another great observation, yeah.

Well, I had to make it clear to the board what we were trying to do, and the management team knew our gross margins were going to get crushed.

So you could imagine a world where GeForce would carry the burden of CUDA, and none of the gamers would appreciate it, and none of the gamers would pay for it.

You know, they only pay a certain price, and it doesn't matter what your cost is.

And so, you know, we increased our costs by 50% and that consumed and we were a 35% gross margin company.

And so it was quite a difficult decision to make.

But you could imagine that someday this would go into workstations and it would go into supercomputers.

And in those segments, maybe we can capture more margin.

So you could reason your way into being able to afford this, but it still took a decade.