Full Transcript for Jensen Huang Ousted by Nvidia Board as CEO

Bloomberg. He is our definitive force on cloud. What is the challenge here, Anurag, in the relationships with all the people that buy these chips for data centers, etc.? Do you have to get out and sell it, as Mandeep was talking about, or do they even get an interregnum. 00:07:37 Speaker 6: Of 30 days? 00:07:39 Speaker 7: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is going to be, you know, NVIDIA has had a very massive, you could say, gap between the others when it comes to AI accelerators. But this is the chance for the others to catch up, you know, whether that's Amazon or Microsoft or Google can close the gap and say, well, why am I paying so much money to NVIDIA for those chips when I can have my own? So far, they are forced to buy those chips because That's what the customers demand. 00:08:06 Speaker 2: That is the best in the business. But if this gives them a little bit of. 00:08:10 Speaker 7: A chance to catch up, I think this could be good for the hyperscale cloud providers. 00:08:15 Speaker 5: Anurag, you've covered Apple forever. As I think about the impossible task of filling the shoes of Jensen Wong, one of the names I think of is Tim Cook. Talk to us about that. 00:08:27 Speaker 2: Oh, you are such a gossip beast. Yeah, I thought about that as well. 00:08:29 Speaker 3: Oh, come on. It would make, it would be, who would play Tim Cook in the movie? No, I don't know. Richard Gere. That would be it. Anurag, continue on Tim Cook. 00:08:39 Speaker 7: Yeah, I think, you know, one of the biggest thing is they just did the transition. The CEO is very young. And Tim said he's going to be chairman for a while. He's going to make sure that he navigates the political headwinds or the political currents both in China and the U.S. I feel very– I'll be surprised if he takes off the responsibility of headwinds. ensuring that Apple's in a great hand before leaving Apple. But to be honest, you don't know at this point. 00:09:07 Speaker 3: Can I impress Anurag with my vast knowledge? 00:09:09 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:09:10 Speaker 3: Anurag, I know you're big on Microsoft and them as a holistic Mag7 future. So they have Azure Maya, M-A-I-A, I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. And they're going to go from Maya 200... out to their newest Maya 300. NVIDIA has that same analog, right? Who's going to make the decision on the next Maya 300 at NVIDIA? 00:09:35 Speaker 7: Yeah, the thing is that I think is the biggest question because as Mandeep was saying, NVIDIA has done a phenomenal job of going from one generation to the other in a very short period of time. And the gap they have with, let's say, Maya. Now, Microsoft has had Maya for years. But to be honest, nobody's rushing out and buying that capacity on that chip. And Microsoft has to be forced to go out and buy NVIDIA chips. If we see some shortening of that innovation curve, you could see down the road that people are using training or inference on Microsoft's buyer chips. We've already seen that with Amazon. Amazon chips are in demand by customers, and Google's obviously far ahead in that game, and they are trying to come up with their own systems by the end of next year. 00:10:21 Speaker 2: So they are already in the market. So I think the competition is going to get very tough over the next few years. 00:10:27 Speaker 3: You say who's ahead. Who's behind? 00:10:31 Speaker 7: I think if we were to do the math right now, NVIDIA being number one in terms of technology, then Google, then Amazon, and then Microsoft. And my math is only driven by what the customer demand is. If the customer is not demanding big Maya workloads all for their inference and training, then I think they are behind. But Microsoft has started to change their own internal first-party apps with Maya chips, which means if you are running Copilot, or for that matter, any other app that runs AI workloads, they are slowly moving it in the background before the customers get comfortable with it. 00:11:08 Speaker 3: Anurag Rana with us, folks. Across America and worldwide, the shock of a resignation at NVIDIA by Jensen Wang. An interim CEO announced the chief financial officer and a new chair of the board, Harvey C. Jones, who's been on the board since, I believe, 1993 as well. We are advantaged with the expertise of Mandeep Singh and now Anurag Rana. And I just want to point out, Paul, that when Anurag says he's doing the math, it's not our math. I walked by his whiteboard in Chicago one day. Thank you. And it was matrix algebra in the eigenspace. Exactly. 00:11:47 Speaker 5: I mean, it was painful. Stock, I'm just looking at NVIDIA stock here. It was down about 7% when the news broke. It's traded down even more. We're down a little more than 10% now in the pre-market trading for NVIDIA. Anurag, when I think about key man risk out there, just in general, I think Elon Musk, certainly with all of his companies, but right there. is Jensen Wong here. He is central. It just seems like, I'm not sure if it's really the case, but it seems like he's central to every single deal that happens in the AI space. How does that stop on a dime? I can't, I mean, how does that play out? 00:12:27 Speaker 7: Paul, I feel the exact same thing, to be honest, because look at the entire neocloud space. They're all there because they know at the back of it, Jensen's there to do a backstop if something bad happens. Now, to their advantage, the last two things that have happened, as Nebia just reported right now, and we had Corviva a couple of days ago, they've started to ask for prepayments. So that's a good thing for them, frankly. Oracle did the same thing. But you are absolutely right. The entire AI trade, as much as it's related to the US-related assets, it's all backstopped by Jensen. So we're going to see a big, big vacuum in this thing. And to be honest, maybe things slows down. And sometimes it's not a bad thing because that would give some time to digest what's happening. Free cash flow gets positive again.

00:13:11 Speaker 2: Maybe CapEx gets pushed out. But maybe that's not a bad thing. 00:13:16 Speaker 3: And one final question here as we stagger through the morning here. And we haven't talked about this. Paul alluded to it once. All of the interdependencies. cross-ownerships of transactions and combinations involved here, they do center around Jensen Wang because everybody needs NVIDIA. What happens to that matrix this morning? 00:13:41 Speaker 7: Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's that ecosystem that's getting shaken up. But guess what ecosystem is not getting shaken up? The one that's around Google, one that's around Amazon, and then what's around Microsoft. These three companies are forced to buy NVIDIA chips. But if they can prove to the market that they can run some workloads on their own chips, I think that changes the equation altogether. 00:14:04 Speaker 3: Can they do that? I've got to get out of that box. I'm saying I've got to get out ahead of this. Anurag Rana, do they have the ability right now to say, look at this, you need stability, buy Amazon, buy Microsoft Silicon? 00:14:18 Speaker 7: I think Google's already there, to be honest. Google TPU is doing very well. And Amazon's done a very good job with their Tranium chips. So it's the third person is Microsoft. And from what we have heard, the Maya 300, when it comes out, it should be at par with at least doing the base. 00:14:35 Speaker 2: Level stuff that what people are looking for. 00:14:37 Speaker 7: So it's time for them to gain market share if we do see some kind of delays in the tech curve of NVIDIA chips. 00:14:46 Speaker 3: I mean, we'll just have to. This is just too much. Anurag Rana, thank you so much. You've got to go. He's going to Travell at the Langham. Oh, is that right? That's the power breakfast in Chicago. 00:14:55 Speaker 5: Very good. 00:14:56 Speaker 3: He's got his own table and the whole thing. Anurag Rana, thank you. Thank you so much here. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this. 00:15:14 Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 7 to 10 a.m. 00:15:20 Speaker 8: Eastern. 00:15:20 Speaker 1: Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Or watch us live on YouTube. 00:15:27 Speaker 3: Joining us from London now, sort of bringing in the financial, along with the imagery that he covers with WPP and Omnicron in that. Matt, finesse for me the image disaster. total train wreck of nvidia how do they pick up the pieces of an image without jensen wong. 00:15:50 Speaker 6: Yeah it's a it's a tool order but you know i guess the most important place is where you start and you know they've started by you know cutting ties with him so um that that's kind of a really important move for them but you know there's still i think probably a lot of chapters of this story to play out you know we've We've not really talked so much, I don't think, yet about what the U.S. investigations could be. And there's a number of predecessors that. 00:16:15 Speaker 2: I can think of. 00:16:16 Speaker 6: And the one at the forefront of my mind is Ericsson that ended up with a deferred prosecution agreement and big fines because of breaking U.S. international kind of trade laws a few years back. So things like that could still be coming up. down the line for Nvidia. So it's going to be a very, very busy, busy time for them on a number of fronts. Here, reassuring customers, talking to the US government, trying to hold back this wave of competitors that you were just talking to Anurag about. One name that wasn't mentioned there was SpaceX and Tesla with their TerraFab, who are also trying to create capacity. So, you know, there's a lot. It's a big, big challenge. 00:17:02 Speaker 5: You know, I'm probably like a lot of people, Tom, listeners and viewers, we don't know who this Colette Kress is. So what do you do on the Bloomer Terminal? You go bio Colette Kress. And I see that she's got a lot of experience in the tech space. But there are 1,600 other people who use the bio function to figure out who Colette Kress is. Matt, talk to us about visibility for the business of NVIDIA here as it deals with this uncertainty here. How much visibility do they have on their revenue stream for the coming quarters? 00:17:33 Speaker 6: I think a lot have been probably visibility through 2027, possibly even into 2028, because the industry has been thinking two or three, maybe four or five steps ahead for quite some time now. When you hear the likes of TSMC and Micron and the kind of Semi's names all talk about being sold out for at least the next 12 months, that's because people have got orders in the pipes with NVIDIA. So I think for now, you know, the business kind of hums along. It's probably more, you know, those kind of two to three year kind of orders. And, you know, as you also mentioned, you know, these kind of investments that they've made across companies, were they backed by just Jensen or was there consensus within the organization about funding those startups? 00:18:24 Speaker 3: A cross section of people today that we speak to within and outside Bloomberg are on this historic moment for technology. And I really mean it. I think of Chip Ward, my book of the summer. I think it was three years ago. This is truly an historic day for technology. Everybody has a different skill set. Matt Block, some folks, brilliantly pulls together razor-sharp financials He's a CFA with sort of the imagery, the structure, the grind of it. Matt Blockson, I'm counting 82 sell-side analysts on NVIDIA. They're sitting in an office right now with their head of research, and importantly, their head of compliance about, okay, what do we do? How does that process work? Yeah. 00:19:14 Speaker 6: Very differently, I think, at different banks, depending on their jurisdiction and their size. Some analysts just end up with a huge amount of freedom to

largely write what they want and take personal responsibility for what's out there. 00:19:29 Speaker 2: You look at some of the big bulge brackets. It's a tricky process. 00:19:32 Speaker 6: And you may well find that people are sitting there frustrated right now that the research they want to put out is not going out or it's going out without the real kind of cutting edge. angle that they want to give. So, yeah, it can be frustrating back and forward for sure when you're in that scene. 00:19:50 Speaker 3: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. It's too many numbers to count at 9, 12 a.m. I'm going to say 14 changes of opinion today. 00:20:02 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:20:02 Speaker 3: Or reaffirmations of opinion just in the Bloomberg. 00:20:05 Speaker 5: Matthew, give our listeners and viewers kind of a sense of Just Jensen Huang and how does he get deals done? How much is Jensen versus NVIDIA? I mean, because some people are trying to just get a sense of how important this guy is to this company. 00:20:22 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:20:23 Speaker 6: I mean, I think you have to say that NVIDIA really is Jensen Huang and that may feel like a bit of disservice to all the people in that company that. 00:20:32 Speaker 2: Make it work. 00:20:33 Speaker 6: But clearly he's co-founder and he's kind of recreated that company into the AI powerhouse that it is. So I think, you know, everything they've done in the last two or three years, really, I think has been inspired by him and his own personal energy and insight and creativity and, you know, expertise in the industry and his ability to kind of create personal relationships with the most important people in the world, both in, you know, politics and in business and really drive those deals through. Before we let you go, I think it's going to be super interesting to see what he does next. 00:21:11 Speaker 3: Matt, before we let you go within the blur that we're dealing with right now, futures negative 53, the arch issue here, and I see it like in the Financial Times, the Telegraph, all the other British papers, is this technology insecurity within the United Kingdom, which I don't get because I know the Cambridge math and I really, really know the imperial technology. Math, you know, our folks, our definitive quantitative finance program, arguably worldwide. Matt Bloxham, how does the United Kingdom get its Technology Act together? 00:21:53 Speaker 2: Yeah, well, like a really tricky question. 00:21:56 Speaker 6: I think that the UK needs to kind of have a clear view of the role it wants to play in the global technology industry. 00:22:04 Speaker 2: Market. And once it's made that decision, really back it. 00:22:08 Speaker 6: With a combination of funding, tax incentives and policy that really kind of allows companies to kind of build on that platform and to encourage inward investment into the UK. And then you start to get into also all the geopolitical issues around, you know, how has Brexit impacted that? But the clarity needs to start with What is the role that this country wants to play in the global technology industry? 00:22:36 Speaker 2: And everything should flow from there. 00:22:39 Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Matt Blocks. I'm greatly, greatly appreciate it. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this. 00:22:55 Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 7 to 10 a.m. Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube. 00:23:07 Speaker 3: He is the dean of technology. The only one I can think of is Rick Sherlin would be close. Ted Mortensen joins us now. 00:23:16 Speaker 4: Mr. 00:23:17 Speaker 3: Mortensen, thank you so much for joining us this morning. What did Jensen Wang do with silicon that no one else did before him? 00:23:28 Speaker 9: He's been three years ahead of anybody in the industry, both from a system standpoint, and that would be not only silicon, but networking and the access to memory. What he's put out with Vera Rubin is probably the biggest advance in compute technology in history. 00:23:47 Speaker 3: So not only is. 00:23:48 Speaker 2: He the. 00:23:51 Speaker 9: Architect of NVIDIA, But he's also really the superintelligence lead and the capital allocator and the political face of AI into Washington. 00:24:06 Speaker 3: So what he has done in. 00:24:10 Speaker 9: The last decade will go down in history as one of the greatest CEOs X of this news. 00:24:20 Speaker 5: Ted, what does the company do now, given that he has stepped down here? I can't even imagine trying to fill those shoes. How does this proceed here. 00:24:29 Speaker 3: Do you think? 00:24:31 Speaker 9: They have to appoint somebody at the CEO level that is recognized by the buy side as a luminary, an expert in superintelligence, and who has a pedigree Similar like some of the DeepMind guys. This is a very coveted job. I bet there's a bunch of people being contacted right now. But they've got to put an A + + player in the seat. 00:25:05 Speaker 3: Ted, I look at this and it just screams to me of. 00:25:11 Speaker 3: You know, different candidates. Is Marissa Myers with her operational research at Stanford? Is she more CEO McKinsey like to take that position wrapped around Ian Buck doing the engineering? 00:25:26 Speaker 9: I tell you, if I had one guy that I'd put in the seat of the Demis Hassabis from DeepMind, I mean, that's the kind of individual. There has to be a technology mind involved in the CEO position, not a person that is consultant, not a person from an adjacent industry. This has got to be a technology appointment. 00:25:51 Speaker 5: What does Jensen Wong do now? I mean, he is central to this whole thing. It's not just his seat. It was him. Uh, I'm not sure what he does now. 00:26:01 Speaker 9: Well, I, you know, I think he's going to be mired in investigation for months upon months.

00:26:07 Speaker 3: And I, my heart goes out to him because we're all human. 00:26:10 Speaker 4: Right. 00:26:11 Speaker 9: And, um, everybody makes a mistake here and there. And, um, I, I hope that, uh, he just didn't walk into a buzzsaw. I mean, um, You know, if he got into a bad situation and it's blowing up like an atomic bomb, there's nothing he can do. What I'm most worried is anything that has espionage around it. We're now in a different zip code. 00:26:39 Speaker 3: We're in a criminal zip code. 00:26:41 Speaker 9: And nobody can avoid that, especially with the change in the political landscape that we saw post the midterms. 00:26:49 Speaker 3: Well, we've got a time constraint with you. We're so happy that you could join us this morning. But let me get this finally in. And I want to go back to Sir Dennis, of course. I mentioned earlier, Ted, the academics of Imperial College and the University of Cambridge. Dennis is arguably the greatest British export of technology. I would suggest as a founder of Google Gemini, he's more software-based. How does he handle the silicon and the cards of NVIDIA? Does he bolt that onto his abilities or does he have to learn that in real time? 00:27:26 Speaker 9: The people at NVIDIA have a hardware pedigree, so that's not a problem. It's just somebody that has to tie both the hardware and the software stack together. 00:27:35 Speaker 3: And I think talking to clients, they are looking. 00:27:38 Speaker 9: I mean, NVIDIA has a 6.6% weighting in the S & P and NASDAQ. I can tell you after conversations last night, all the portfolio managers need to see that A-plus player, and it's got to be relatively quick. 00:27:54 Speaker 5: Competitive threats here is... How vulnerable is NVIDIA right now? 00:27:59 Speaker 9: I think they're vulnerable on price and gross margin because to maintain. 00:28:06 Speaker 9: I think they're going to see price concessions. They're going to have to give price concessions to some customers. I think, obviously, AMD ad nauseum has been talked about the last two days. They're in the catbird seat. Broadcom should get some business. I would say some of my clients are really looking at Google on the TPU side, AWS on Tranium's side. Marvell, Celestica, you know, a bunch of names. You're going to see portfolio managers reduce their way overweight positions on the index side, and they're going to spread out risk. 00:28:49 Speaker 3: This has been wonderful, Ted. Wonderful to see you in the blur of your Baird day. Ted Mortensen, definitive in American technology. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this. 00:29:10 Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 7 to 10 a.m. Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube. 00:29:22 Speaker 3: An economic story with Anna Wong is always wonderful with Bloomberg U.S. Economics. Eight ways to go here, but we must look at our technology. It's part of our nominal GDP boom, this moment that the haves and have-nots of America are living. 00:29:39 Speaker 2: Dr. 00:29:40 Speaker 3: Wong, the economic impact of this crisis at NVIDIA. 00:29:45 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:29:46 Speaker 8: One way to think about this is to ask ourselves, what if this NVIDIA shock becomes more of a given other impulse to this AI sell-off and leading to a broader equity correction? So if you simulate the shock in the Fed's Fervus general equilibrium model, so suppose that S & P 500 fall by another 20%. So we found that it will roughly subtract one percentage point. To GDP it will barely do anything to inflation because typically- equity price correction just do not- just not just equity but- any demand shock just do not really move the- dial on inflation. Unemployment rate will rise by roughly point five percent. Point in the next year so that pushes. if the baseline is 4.2% on the street, then that could push it to 4.7%. And the mechanism of all this is primarily through the consumer wealth channel, right? So currently about 40% of household net worth is tied to equity and So when you have an equity correction like this, it could affect the GDP consumption through that channel. But I think the risk for this particular time that we are living in is that it could be a bigger impact because the Fed is not going to react. So even in the Fed's own model, it says the Fed should be– reducing rates by 50 pips. But right now, the Fed is thinking about or Chris Waller is talking about. 00:31:32 Speaker 3: Raising rates by 50 pips. 00:31:35 Speaker 8: So it actually removed this very powerful offsetting channel against these drag on the economy. And so if the Fed, if the equity correction would not do anything to inflation and the Fed is on track to not hike, as the SEP says, or even hike by 80 bps, as the Warp or the future suggests, then the GDP hit could be even larger at 1.5 percentage point, basically reducing GDP to zero. 00:32:04 Speaker 3: Have you ever heard Anna Wong this gloomy? 00:32:06 Speaker 2: No. 00:32:07 Speaker 3: I have never heard it. Paul, save the interview. 00:32:10 Speaker 5: Anna, so talk to us just about, you know, we got some inflation data here. Talk to us about your thoughts of underlying inflation here. We do have crude oil that's been coming down over the past several days, but still there's that underlying what a lot of people call sticky inflation. Talk to us about that. 00:32:28 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:32:29 Speaker 8: So, Paul, inflation truly is a very complex subject as there's so much detail to look at. So we have So as a result, we constructed the Bloomberg Price Project, which looks at millions of prices each month, right? And what it's saying is that the headline inflation is actually stronger than BLS is saying. So BLS numbers would imply that year-over-year inflation is probably growing at 3.9%. But our Bloomberg Price Project says it's 4.6%. But it

also says, our project also says the underlying pace of inflation is not as broad-based as the BLS number suggests. So once you trim the outliers, we are actually at 2.3%. for underlying inflation and core is at roughly 2.5%. So I think the Fed is in a tough place here because on one hand, you just can't ignore the really strong headline number and people are feeling the inflation squeeze from the strong headline number. But on the other hand, the underlying is not showing much of the broadening. 00:33:40 Speaker 3: Anna, thank you so much. Anna Wong, really, really appreciate it this morning. Dr. Wong driving all of our U.S. economics and particularly to the December 9th meeting as well. It is on, and I hope I'm going to get this pronunciation right, Ed Ludlow's there three and four times a week. It is Berryessa Road, San Jose, California. And there's a Denny's. with a plaque, and I think it's table four. This is where Jensen and the NVIDIA clan hung out and invented it all. We are thrilled with Ted Mortensen just on with us with all of his decades of experience truly in the trenches on this day after day. Ed Ludlow joins us with Bloomberg Technology. Ed Ludlow, how will the employees, 40-some thousand of NVIDIA, how will they respond to this moment? 00:34:35 Speaker 10: I spoke to several of them yesterday. You know, it was Veterans Day yesterday, right? So to take you inside that building at NVIDIA HQ, it was a holiday for most staff. And as one engineer put it to me, he said, I don't want to log on because I don't want to face what is out there, you know, in the reporting at that time. Now there is confirmation. Jensen Wong has resigned as CEO. Colette Kress, who is very familiar to Wall Street, very familiar with is interim CEO and they've made these adjustments to the board. But yeah, you know, the way that Jensen ran that business, it was structured so deliberately where he had like 60 direct reports and then the tens of thousands of people underneath that and it worked, you know, it worked that way. But I think many people are in shock, even though Sunday, this past Sunday, Jensen Wang had communicated to all staff what had taken place. 00:35:32 Speaker 5: So, Ed, we were just talking with Ted Mortensen, a tech analyst at Baird, and he made the really strong comment that what the company needs right now in terms of a successor is a very, very well-respected tech leader, as opposed to maybe a Wall Street type of hire. What are you hearing out there in the Valley? 00:35:53 Speaker 10: Well, look, I mean, Colette Cress is CEO on an interim basis. And in the statement, the board was clear that they will review external candidates. And in the media reports that we have, the external candidates are technology people. One of them is Arm CEO, Rene Haas, who you guys will be familiar with. But he was at Nvidia for seven years. 2006, he ran the compute business. He knows the semiconductor industry. NVIDIA's systems are based on ARM architecture. So

people see that as a likely front runner. There are several names out there. And internally, Ian Buck, did I hear Tom say the name Ian Buck earlier or did I mishear that? 00:36:33 Speaker 3: Ed, we're pretending it's Bloomberg Technology. I've nailed the board this morning. I mean, continue. 00:36:38 Speaker 10: No, super smart. You know, Ian led the team that wrote the CUDA software language. That is the software that allows GPUs to be used for AI training and inference. And he has been there for a long time and is essentially a co-founder. And maybe, you know, he lacks the characteristics that Jensen Wong has. But people talk about him, too. 00:37:00 Speaker 3: OK, but to help me here, because Ted Mortensen brought this up, I guess that my puny brain would have picked it up at some point. But Mortensen out front of Ludlow, out front of Keene in Sweden. 00:37:11 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:37:11 Speaker 3: The combination of Sir Demas Hassabis, Nobel laureate in chemistry, Google deep mind and the rest, founder of Google Gemini, arguably, the combination of Sir Demas and Ian Buck sounds like a rapid solution. Am I off the mark? 00:37:29 Speaker 10: Well, any great software and hardware combination will be talked about until it's confirmed right. You're not off the mark. I mean, increasingly, NVIDIA has accrued incredible software talent anyway. And what I would say in answer to your question is the 60 people that were reported directly into Jensen Wang include an astonishing number. astonishing experience and talent in the domains of AI models and in the compute that powers them. There's no shortage of that. But I would also just say, remember recent reporting that Demis Hassabis was frozen out at Google DeepMind for a wide range of reasons. 00:38:09 Speaker 3: Okay. And this question comes in, I mean, it's 22 degrees this weekend in Stillwater, Minnesota. 00:38:15 Speaker 2: Oh boy. 00:38:16 Speaker 3: I mean, winter is upon us here. Steve in Stillwater does a compare-contrast, and Ed, you're perfect for this. 00:38:24 Speaker 2: Mr. 00:38:24 Speaker 3: Wang, as compared to Steve Jobs, the impact of Jobs on Apple, I guess they did okay. And then, Wang, give us your take here on a rational comparison of Jobs and Wang. 00:38:39 Speaker 10: So, both engineers, you know, that's really important. Unique style and approach. Steve Jobs, the turtleneck. If you're watching this show right now on YouTube, as you see on the screen, NVIDIA, the leather jacket of Jensen Wang. But I think the main point of difference that I would flag to you is that Jensen Wang made a fundamental change in how the semiconductor industry works. Historically, you don't just walk into the Nvidia store, pick up a bag of chips and walk out. It never worked like that. You go through a middleman and that middleman was Dell or it was HPE or it was Supermicro. There was no business of Jensen flying around the world selling chips to everyone. It just doesn't work that way. 00:39:26 Speaker 5:

And it didn't. 00:39:27 Speaker 10: But he made it so. 00:39:28 Speaker 3: Very different. 00:39:30 Speaker 10: Business model and that now going forward will be interesting because he has the role of being the face of the company, but also the relationships with the president of the United States, the leaders in Southeast Asia and the CEOs of. 00:39:43 Speaker 5: All the companies. 00:39:44 Speaker 10: You know who the first, well, I don't wanna get in trouble. The first people I heard from last night when the reports came out, about the board looking at how StingJets won, where the leaders of the companies he does business with, you know, before we really heard anything from NVIDIA at all. 00:39:59 Speaker 3: I think that says a lot. Ed, you're not going to get in trouble. No one listens to Bloomberg surveillance. No one watches us on YouTube. So you're not going to get in trouble. Paul Sweeney with Bloomberg Technologies, Ed Ludlow. 00:40:12 Speaker 5: Ed, give us a sense of how integral it is Mr. Jensen was to getting all of these deals. A lot of people refer to them as circular deals with all these technology companies. How much of it was Jensen Wong himself personally versus I got to do business with NVIDIA because they're just the biggest and best out there? 00:40:33 Speaker 10: I think that there's an element of both, but Jensen Wang was very directly involved in many of the transactions that NVIDIA does. One thing I'd point out to the audience that I had to remind myself of quite recently is NVIDIA has an investment arm, Nventures, NVIDIA Ventures. And those guys are like a team of very capable people. Think about them as like, you know, your business development team, your M & A guys. And they were busy, like they were out there thinking about all of this. But, you know, Jensen Huang was very consistent on pushing back against the circular financing thing as a bad problem, as an issue. You know, the way that he looked at it is that NVIDIA has lots of capital. They're throwing off cash, as you know. You and I've talked about that very regularly. What does NVIDIA do with all the cash? And these companies that are relatively small right through to some of their giant partners needed liquidity essentially to grease the wheels, to buy compute and install it. And the way that Jensen Wang would always say is that that's no bad thing. It got people to actually move, get stuff done. 00:41:39 Speaker 3: What has changed now at Amazon, Google, AMD, all the rest of them, is they try to plan out, I'm going to say, Ed, amateurly, a six-month plan. We've had others today say this is a moment where they can seize the high ground. Do you buy that? 00:41:58 Speaker 10: Well, so one just piece of reporting is that NVIDIA's earnings are going to go ahead next Tuesday, which, you know, I don't think anyone thought they wouldn't. But this change, Jensen Wang resigning immediately and Colette Crest leading the company on an interim basis, like in the here and

now, nothing changes for anyone, including those customers that you just mentioned. talked about, they were already working on their own chips. They were already trying to diversify away from relying on NVIDIA. And it's highly unlikely that in the next fiscal year, NVIDIA, that the picture changes dramatically. Maybe it will. It's so hard to calculate. Again, I would say it was not Colette Crest, the CFO, making the bold growth predictions. Um, it was often gents among, so I guess whether they're on the same page or not, we don't know, but yeah, I hope that answers the question. 00:42:47 Speaker 5: So Ed, I guess next Wednesday post-close is going to be must see, you know, conference call with this company reporting earnings here. How do you think they play it here? 00:42:59 Speaker 10: Um, prepared remarks. Do they take questions from the analysts, Paul? You know, in history, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do, or sometimes the IR team will say, we will not be taking any further questions on a particular subject. Sometimes legal counsel gets involved. One thing, I think it's actually next Tuesday that they report earnings, which is unusual because if you go on Ask B on the Bloomberg terminal, it will tell you that in NVIDIA's history with the Bloomberg data available, it's only reported earnings on a Tuesday, 7% of the time. They always do Wednesday. So that was kind of odd going into it anyway. 00:43:39 Speaker 3: And you got to dash. Let me do this. I just think it's important. We opened with this iconic Denny's in San Francisco where these NVIDIA geniuses put it all together. When you go to Denny's, Ed, is it the Philly cheesesteak omelet or the T-bone steak and eggs? 00:43:57 Speaker 10: T-bone steak and eggs. 00:43:58 Speaker 3: I'm a big protein guy. It's like, you know, it's full British, full whales. It's like the way they go. What are you going to do on the show today? I can't imagine. You must be blowing it up. 00:44:10 Speaker 10: I'm going to seek the person that argues fiercely that Jensen should have stayed, irrespective of his infidelity, because there are so many of those people out there. They really there really are. So so there's a scandal here. There's some national security questions. But most people I've spoken to believe that the board should not have done this. 00:44:30 Speaker 3: I mean, Alexis, I mean, Ed Ludlow on entertainment tonight. I can see I can see it. 00:44:34 Speaker 11: You know, I actually have a question for Ed. Is it out of the question, Ed, that Wong at some point could be brought on, retained as a consultant to the company? So at least investors feel like he has input into the company's future. 00:44:47 Speaker 2: Well, yeah. 00:44:49 Speaker 3: He doesn't. 00:44:49 Speaker 10: The statement says nothing about that. No advisory role, no chairman emeritus. And one Silicon Valley consideration or actually big global consideration, Jensen doesn't have any massive voting power. He doesn't even have that much economic ownership of the company. So there's no sort of class of shares that give him, you know, the deciding vote. And, you know, that has been the big point of difference with him. 00:45:13 Speaker 3: See, the control room thought Alexis's question was brilliant. She's a pro. They never say that to me. Ed Ludlow can't wait for Bloomberg Technology. Truly, folks, the arc going back to, I'm going to say just after World War II, truly an historic day for American 20th and 21st century technology. Look to Ed Ludlow, Bloomberg Technology, all of his great work out on social as well. 00:45:39 Speaker 1: This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live each weekday, 7 to 10 a.m. Eastern, on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.