– First line of the Declaration of Independence of the United States (July 4th, 1776)
Thirty two years after its founding, Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company. A semiconductor company has never before occupied that position. Why now? Because everything is up for grabs starting with the most basic building block of computing. In the course of human events, this was necessary and inevitable.
This is the age of AI. Earlier, the CPU based tech stack was limited in its ability to comprehend and implement on our behalf. The use cases it could address had to be dumbed down. It was still impressive, leading to improving productivity and well-being for several billion people. A few trillion dollar companies emerged as the most creative exponents of the CPU stack. That era is over. The new GPU based stack pioneered by Nvidia has the potential to mimic the human brain. We don’t have to dumb down the world for it to deliver magical benefits to humanity.
The implication of this re-imagination of the stack from the CPU to the GPU is that computing will approach the TAM of human intelligence. Anywhere intelligence is applied, computing will show up. This makes everything up for grabs from hardware all the way up to the application layer. In every industry, for everyone, on earth and space.
How will the future unfold? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave a hint during their recent annual shareholder meeting where he’s quoted as saying: “We’re working towards a day where there will be billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories that can be powered by Nvidia technology”.
One of the benefits of being an early stage specialist is that we get to see a glimpse of the future before it’s obvious. On the last Friday of June, on a hot summer day in north Texas close to the Oklahoma border, we were lucky to witness firsthand what Jensen alludes to. We took a ride in an autonomous, driverless, Class 6 truck built by our portfolio company Gatik AI, doing commercial deliveries for Pepsi. This truck seamlessly does things that an experienced truck driver would do (see image above). So what? Gatik is the only company in North America that operates driverless trucks on commercial routes. It took 8 years to build its Agentic AI autonomous driver, based on a GPU tech stack, pass a comprehensive third-party safety audit and regulatory approvals from multiple state & local authorities in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona & Canada. Gatik is leading the re-imagination of the logistics supply chain that’s going to have a far reaching impact in coming decades. We are lucky to be one of just a handful of people who have now driven in both driverless cars (Waymo) and a driverless truck. Soon, this will be the experience of billions of humans and their packaged goods.