TMTB: Nvidia's Jensen (NVDA) and Michael Dell (DELL) Key quotes
Jensen and Michael were interviewed together today at Dell World in Las Vegas. Some interesting quotes, especially with NVDA EPS coming up on Wednesday:
#1 — Supply Constraints: Memory & Semiconductors as the Bottleneck
Interviewer: “What is the biggest supply constraint for you right now?”
Dell: “Certainly memory is a challenge. I think it is memory. The advanced node semiconductors are still challenging. The semiconductor supply chain is ramping, but demand is growing faster than supply.”
Huang: “In our case, we provide the technology integrated — the memory comes with our technology. We’ve been planning our supply chain for two to three years. We have the largest supply chain in the world. Our partners have done a great job securing supply for us. Everything is lined up — the HBM is lined up with the Grace Blackwells and the CPUs, the silicon photonics is lined up. It’s just that demand is much greater than the overall capacity of the world.”
Dell: “These things are very hard to predict. If you tried to predict in 2023 what the demand was going to be in 2027, you would have a hard time doing that. It does take a long time to build these factories. But we’ve got great relationships with these partners — we have for decades — and that’s helping us. They see that we’re winning, so they want to work with us even more.”
#2 — This Is Not a Cyclical Memory Boom (Structural Demand)
Interviewer: “Should I put my textbook away? Because my textbook tells me that memory historically is cyclical — boom and bust. You both have to convince the memory makers of the permanency of this to build the capacity. Is that the right way of looking at it — that this is not a boom and bust cycle, it’s a complete change in the structure of that market?”
Huang: “We spent a lot of time with the supply chain. If you ask Sanjay Mehrotra over at Micron, they’ll tell you — three years ago during a meeting, I explained the future to him exactly as it’s happening right now. I was really grateful that Micron really lined up all of our roadmap. Tony will tell you over at SK that we did the same thing years before. It’s our job to make sure that the vision of the future of the industry we convey upstream to our supply chain so that they are building for it. We also have to convey it downstream to people who have power generators and land and financing. We have to make sure the supply chain upstream and downstream are prepared for the future.”
#3 — Agentic AI: The Next Buildout Wave (Billions of Digital Workers)
Huang: “The simple logic is this: we have now reached a level of agentic AI — useful AI, productive AI capability. The way to think about these agents is like digital workers. We have hundreds of millions of digital workers in the world. We’re going to have billions of AI agents, and they’re going to be working 24/7. Just as we give every digital worker a laptop and a small part of the data center, we’re going to have to give every agent essentially a computer and a little bit of storage and a data center to use.”
“Think about it this way — you do individual work as a person in a day and send it on to somebody else. Well, now you might have hundreds or thousands of digital agents working for you. You supervise. That’s going to help you be way more productive, get way more things done, and expand your creativity. It does require a lot more computing and memory and storage and working — all of the things that we’re doing together.”
Dell: “Instead of humans using tools, it’s now agents using tools. We’re going to have billions of agents. People use tools every now and then. Agents are going to use tools all the time, and agents use tools very quickly. So we’re going to need a lot more CPUs. Those CPUs are connected to GPU brains so that the CPUs know how to think, how to reason, how to plan, and how to use those tools.”
#4 — Enterprise Moving from Testing to Production (On-Prem AI Factories)
Interviewer: “One thousand new clients for AI factory is a hell of a jump. What is it that those new clients — 5,000 total — are actually building now versus a year ago?”
Dell: “The change we see is moving from testing and evaluating into production. We showed some great examples on stage — Eli Lilly, the thousand GPUs in the physical world at Samsung. These are not things on a screen. This is in the real world with the largest companies in the world. It’s propagating broadly across all customers, every industry, in every country. While it is exciting and has been a tremendous amount of growth, I still think it’s just the beginning of this wave — particularly when it comes to enterprise, which is where we have an enormous opportunity.”
Huang: “Intelligence has to be produced at the point of context. Wherever the context is, wherever the action is, that’s where you want to produce the intelligence. For most of the early applications, AI tools were in the cloud. A lot of consumer services are in the cloud. However, for Lilly, Samsung, future manufacturing — you want agents to be on-prem because that’s where all of your data is, your secure data, your proprietary data, and all of the skills associated with your companies.”
#5 — The Supply Chain Will Struggle to Keep Up for a Decade