Text size

Shares of Nvidia (NVDA) are up $16.52, or almost 8%, at $234.04, following better-than-expected fiscal Q4 results and outlook yesterday afternoon, which is prompting another round of price target increases this morning, into the $300 range.

Founder and CEO Jensen Huang was kind enough to take a few minutes to talk with me by phone following the report. He was in an upbeat mood, as he often is after a quarter. He had spent the Chinese New Year traveling through Asia, handing out red envelopes with cash, he said.

When I asked Huang if he wanted to point out anything in particular about the report and outlook, Huang began, “Clearly, there’s a lot of talk about crypto,” meaning, crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, and their role in selling GPUs. “And crypto was a real part of our business this past quarter, even though small, overall."

Crypto is still just a small portion because "data centers is growing so fast,” meaning, the rise of sales of chips to power things such as A.I., which rose by "more than triple-digits,” he pointed out. And "GForce gaming has grown, and self-driving cars — the momentum is just great."

If that sounds like a way to deflect the obsession with crypto, I asked Huang if he was satisfied with the Street’s constant demand for information about crypto.

Said Huang, "Crypto is a real thing — it’s not going to go away.

He then went into an extended disquisition about crypto:

This year, the world is starting to come to terms with the existence of crypto. It’s based on blockchain, and it's very secure and very low overhead. I think there’s clearly real utility. It’s a real phenomenon, and so everyone is coming to terms with it. I’m not against the concept of virtual currency — it’s as real as virtual goods, and video games. And as you know, tens of millions of virtual goods are created and shared and sold in virtual reality, and people invest thousands of hours to create space ships in space that they battle against each other. So, the concept of virtual goods and virtual worlds and virtual currency all ties together.

Yes, but, I repeated, was he happy with the Street’s obsession?

"That conversation,” said Huang, "it’s understandable, but in the final analysis, it’s not relevant. Because to us, it’s all just demand for GPUs."

“The reason that A.I. and A.R. and all the other applications use our GPUs is because they are the most high-throughput and programmable, energy-efficient processors on the planet today."

"That’s why we’re attracting all these applications."

Lastly, I asked Huang to expand upon something he said during a press breakfast at the Consumer Electronics Show last month in Las Vegas.

During that breakfast, I asked Huang how he will keep programmers focused on the “CUDA” software that runs his GPUs, when there are so many different software “frameworks” that are sprouting to handle different kinds of machine learning tasks. Huang had responded by telling me CUDA is going to do even better amidst software diversity because it serves as a kind of anchor, a point of stability amidst change.

I asked Huang last night if he has any special plans to advance CUDA this year.

Said Huang:

One of the biggest advances last year was the Tensor core, an instruction set and microarchitecture that makes it possible to boost deep learning dramatically. The combination of the NV-link for 8 processors, and then boost it with tensor core, and then boost it with Volta — that’s how we got a couple hundred times speed up. So, I think this year, we’re going to see two things. The first thing we are going to see is, framework makers optimize their frameworks for tensor core and NV-link, so that’s ongoing. The second thing we are seeing is all these applications are growing in complexity, from CNNs [convolutional neural networks] to RNNs to GANNs to reinforcement learning and one-shot learning. So many new types of machine clearing, it’s really growing fast and the complexity expanding. With all these directions in which A.I. is going, our stable platform is just an enormous advantage. Anyone can buy the Nvidia architecture, and it just works.

I ended our talk telling Huang to "Keep up the good work."

Said Huang, “Im going to do just that."