NVIDIA is now a one of the largest players in the technology marketIts capitalization is much higher than Intel and AMD. But it turns out that AMD almost bought the company once. A former AMD engineer recently said that when NVIDIA was a startup, the company almost bought it CEO Jensen Huang then refused because he categorically demanded that he remain CEO of the merged company.
Hemant Mohapatra worked as an engineer in the mid- to late 2000s developing support, graphics, and AMD central processing units. He was at the company when AMD realized its opportunity in the graphics card market but initially missed it. Mohapatra offered a selection of his own memories of those days on X Twitter (the post below and the entire thread).
So now that Nvidia has far outstripped the market cap of AMD and Intel, I thought this would be a fun story to tell. I spent 6+yrs @ AMD engg in mid to late 2000s helping design the CPU/APU/GPUs that we see today. Back then it was unimaginable for AMD to beat Intel in market-cap… pic.twitter.com/bYCS5vY0QO
— Hemant Mohapatra (@MohapatraHemant) July 5, 2024
Among other things, Mohapatra talked about the negotiations to merge AMD and NVIDIA into one company. However, Jensen Huang had a long-term strategy and led NVIDIA’s GPUs to the proprietary and closed CUDA model. Not wanting to abandon this strategy, Huang refused to sell NVIDIA unless he was appointed CEO. After that, AMD’s then-CEO Hector Ruiz decided to acquire ATI with its Radeon video cards.
Another longtime AMD employee, Phil Park, confirmed these words. Although Park said he had never met Mohapatra and had different opinions on several of his recollections, he said the story about Huang wanting to be CEO was true. Park additionally commented on some of Mohapatra’s posts.
I’ve never met Hemant, and though there are a few things where I have a different opinion, the anecdote about Jensen wanting to be CEO is true. https://t.co/TJjYeGSZvE
— Phil Park (@philparkbot) July 5, 2024
At the time, NVIDIA was a small company, its graphics cards were in high demand among gaming enthusiasts, but ATI had a larger market share. Mohapatra says that AMD «never thought of them [NVIDIA] in the same league as Arm and Intel».
Source: Tom`s Hardware
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