Today NVIDIA competes with Microsoft and Apple in market capitalizationthanks to its artificial intelligence chips that made it grow exponentially, but there were years in which it was certainly not so strong and, according to a former engineer, it even risked be acquired by AMDits historic rival, which today it outclasses in every respect. If it had not been for a claim by Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, who wanted to become the sole CEO of the company after the merger, the deal could have gone through.
Engineer Hemant Mohapatra told the story in a lengthy post on X, where he pointed out the irony of seeing NVIDIA so far ahead of AMD: “Now that NVIDIA has far surpassed AMD and Intel in market cap, I thought it would be interesting to tell this story. I worked as an engineer at AMD for over 6 years in the mid to late 2000s, helping design the CPUs/APUs/GPUs we see today.
At the time, it was unimaginable that AMD could beat Intel in terms of market capitalization (which happened in 2020!) and that Nvidia could surpass both of them! In fact, AMD almost bought Nvidia, but Jensen Huang (CEO of Nvidia) was unwilling to sell unless he could replace Hector Ruiz (CEO of AMD) as CEO of the merged company. The world would have been a very different place if that had happened.”
Mohapatra then gave the background context, explaining how AMD was constantly looking for a way to catch up with Intel, which was always ahead of it in CPU production, and how the acquisition of ATI opened up a new market for the company, despite there being internal doubts about it, because at the time GPUs had a lower demand than they do today and, above all, compared to that of CPUs.
Who knows what the world of technology would have been like if that merger had gone ahead. There would probably be very different products on the market today. Just recently it emerged that what saved AMD in the last decade was the deal with Sony for the PS4 chips.
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