Nvidia and Sega go back 30 years. Jensen Huang flew to Tokyo to thank the games maker for a $5m investment that saved his company from bankruptcy in 1995.
“If not for what Sega did for Nvidia, Nvidia would not be here today.” That is Jensen Huang, chief executive of the world’s most valuable company, thanking a games maker that once saved it from collapse.
Huang met former Sega boss Shoichiro Irimajiri and the game designer Yu Suzuki in Tokyo on Wednesday, Reuters reported. He went to say thank you for a $5m cheque written 30 years ago.
“That we had chosen exactly the wrong technology, and that we will be here today, the largest company in the world, is unimaginable,” Huang said. “Your belief in us means a lot to me.”
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In 1995, Nvidia shipped its first chip, the NV1. It drew graphics with curved shapes rather than triangles. The maths was elegant. The timing was terrible.
Microsoft soon made triangles the standard for PC graphics with DirectX. That left the NV1 stranded. A follow-up chip Nvidia was building with Sega was scrapped.
By the mid-1990s, the startup had about 30 days of cash left, Tom’s Hardware notes. Huang flew to Japan to admit the failure in person.
The $5m lifeline
Huang asked Sega to turn a contract payment into an equity investment. He told Irimajiri the money would most likely be lost. Without it, he said, Nvidia had no chance at all.
Irimajiri backed him and persuaded Sega’s board. The $5m bought Nvidia roughly six more months. The company used it to build the RIVA 128, a triangle-based chip that shipped in 1997 and sold a million units in four months.
That was the turnaround. Nvidia went public in 1999. Sega later sold its stake for about $15m.
A $1 trillion goodbye
Had Sega held on, that stake would be worth roughly $1tn today. Nvidia is now the most valuable company on earth, its AI chips the backbone of the boom.
Huang, now known for his leather-jacket keynotes and even a CGI version of himself, tells the near-death story often, usually to young engineers. This time he told it to the people who wrote the cheque. The two firms used the visit to mark 30 years, with a new Virtua Fighter game heading to Nvidia hardware.
