Despite his tremendous success building AI chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang admits he’s “always in a state of anxiety."
The Nvidia CEO shared this and other personal revelations during a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
He also talked AI with Rogan: everything from the future of autonomous agents to the geopolitical stakes of the artificial intelligence race. He compared the current tech landscape to the Manhattan Project in its strategic importance and framed AI infrastructure as a matter of national security.
Yet, some of the most revealing moments of the conversation were personal. Huang said he’s driven every day by a deep-rooted fear of failure, not a desire to succeed.
To dig into what this influential CEO said and what lessons it holds for other business leaders, I talked with SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 184 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
Huang emphasized the immense importance of AI to our country’s national security and said the technology will create information superpowers, energy superpowers and military superpowers. He argued that keeping critical technology manufacturing in America is essential to national security.
Talking about AI safety, he said it should operate similar to how cybersecurity does today: as a collaborative, global network of defenders constantly sharing information to patch vulnerabilities as they arise.
But for Roetzer, the interview’s true value wasn't in the big-picture AI analysis. It was in the human side of Huang’s story, specifically, the details around when the company nearly collapsed.
When Nvidia started in the early 1990s, the company focused on graphics chips for gaming. But their technical approach didn’t work. As a result, just two years into their founding, they were on the brink of bankruptcy.
Huang flew to Japan to meet with the CEO of Sega, with whom Nvidia had a contract to develop chips for their gaming console. He told the CEO that his company’s approach failed, and it couldn’t honor its contract.
Then, he asked for something audacious: Would Sega allow Nvidia to convert the $5 million it had already paid under the contract into an equity investment? Otherwise, the company was done.
The Sega CEO agreed, and Nvidia survived.
Decades later, Huang bet the company’s future again.
Around 2016, Nvidia spent billions developing the DGX-1, a supercomputer designed for deep learning that didn't exist yet. But no one wanted to buy it.
Then along came Elon Musk, who, at the time, was with OpenAI. He bought Nvidia’s computer.
Huang personally delivered it to OpenAI’s office, and considers this a major turning point for the company, as the computer helped ignite the modern AI revolution.
The CEO confessed to Rogan that he isn't driven by the “high” many get from winning. He’s driven instead by the fear of losing everything. It's a feeling he’s never shaken, even with Nvidia now the world's most valuable chipmaker. He also talked about the loneliness he feels as the leader of an enormous, high-stakes company.
Roetzer said he can relate to the isolation CEOs feel.
“It is an insanely lonely place,” says Roetzer. “There are very few people who understand what you're going through and the decisions you have to make every day and the personal risk you have to take to do things.”
In building the Marketing AI Institute, Roetzer recalled going eight years without turning a profit, driven only by the belief that AI would eventually transform the industry.
“You have to have this insane faith that you're right, and you're going to figure it out,” says Roetzer.
Huang described his journey from a 9-year-old immigrant who wound up at a Kentucky reform school with his parents back in Thailand, to a CEO betting billions on unproven hardware. He says his difficult youth and his parents’ grit helped him build the resilience to run a company and drive innovation.
“It might help you understand a little bit better the entrepreneurial mindset and why maybe entrepreneurs seem a little crazy to most people,” says Roetzer. “'Because we have to be.”
As business leaders face the daunting pace of AI advancements, Huang’s story is a reminder that you don't have to be fearless to succeed. You just have to keep persisting.