Summary
Thirty years ago, Nvidia had roughly 30 days of cash left and a failed graphics chip project behind it. Last week in Tokyo, its chief executive return…
Thirty years ago, Nvidia had roughly 30 days of cash left and a failed graphics chip project behind it. Last week in Tokyo, its chief executive returned to thank the man who kept the company alive.
At an event held at the former site of the Sega Game Center in Akihabara, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared a stage with Shoichiro Irimajiri, the former Sega president whose decision to invest $5 million in the struggling startup has become one of the most consequential acts of faith in technology history. They were joined by legendary game designer Yu Suzuki, Sega chairman Haruki Satomi and Sega president Shushi Utsumi.
"If it weren't for everything Sega did, and if it weren't for everything Shoichiro Irimajiri did, Nvidia would not have survived today," Huang said.
The story began in the mid-1990s, when Sega hired the young Nvidia to build a graphics chip for its next-generation console. Nvidia bet on an unconventional approach — quadratic texture mapping — just as the industry standardized on polygonal rendering and Microsoft's DirectX. The project failed, and completing it would have bankrupted the startup.
Huang flew to Japan and admitted the failure in person. Irimajiri, then a senior Sega executive, responded in an unusual way: Sega cancelled the contract but invested about $5 million in Nvidia anyway. Huang has recalled warning him that the money would likely be lost. After a few days of consideration, Irimajiri answered: "We'll invest."
The cash bought Nvidia about six months. The company laid off 60 percent of its staff, started over, and in 1997 launched the RIVA 128, the hit chip that founded its position in graphics — the business that eventually made it the central supplier of the artificial intelligence era.
Sega did fine as well, selling its stake when Nvidia went public for roughly $300 million. But Huang has often noted the counterfactual: had Sega held the $5 million investment, he has said, it would probably be worth about $1 trillion today.
The reunion was not only ceremonial. Huang's Tokyo visit placed Japan at the center of Nvidia's push into physical AI, with expanded partnerships involving Toyota, Fanuc and Fujitsu on robotics and autonomous driving, and a plan with the Japanese consortium Noetra to build a national AI factory using 27,500 of Nvidia's Rubin GPUs. Sega, for its part, will see its future game titles support Nvidia's RTX Spark platform — a partnership that began with a failure, became a lifeline, and now spans three decades.
Source: Video Games Chronicle
