"I have 3,300 employees in Israel. I also have nearly a hundred employees in Gaza and the West Bank - and our hearts are with all of them. The most important thing, of course, is to stay safe, and we are doing everything we can as a company to support them," said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang during a Q&A session with journalists at the GTC conference held in San Jose, California.
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"Israel is one of Nvidia's largest homes in terms of population ratio. Israel is also home to some of our most talented engineers. Our most significant investments, like NVSwitch, came from Israel," Huang added.
"The thing I showcased, which is the heart and soul of the Blackwell processor, came from Israel. And so, we will continue to invest heavily in Israel. This entire region is very important to me. We also support all our Palestinian employees in the West Bank, and we care for them and their families. There is no risk that they will lose our support. Therefore, this region is very important to us. The employees need to know that the company stands behind them," Huang further stated.
"For them to do their best work, they need to know that their base is strong. Nvidia is a strong company. Our base is strong and we have unequivocal support for our employees there. And they should know that. They need to know. They do know that we are going to invest in Israel, we are going to support them 100%, and no matter what their background is, we are there for them," according to the CEO.
In the last quarter of 2023, Nvidia reported revenues of $22.1 billion – a 3.6-fold increase compared to revenues of $6 billion in the last quarter of 2022. In summary, Nvidia reported nearly $61 billion in revenues for 2023, more than double compared to the revenues in 2022, which amounted to about $27 billion. As part of the company's report, it was revealed that its revenues from telecommunications operations stand at about $13 billion. This activity is largely based on the acquisition of Mellanox in 2019.
During the event, Huang referred to the products the company showcased during the conference and said, "At our main event, I presented a number of things. The first is that our industry is undergoing two transitions simultaneously. The first transition is how the computer is built, and how the computer is built from general-purpose computing to accelerated computing. And the second is what it can do".
"In the case of generative AI, it does one thing. It processes one thing for one person, the company, and that is creating artificial intelligence. When you interact with ChatGPT, there is groundbreaking artificial intelligence, and when you interact with ChatGPT, it creates tokens. And it creates points that turn into words, images, sounds, proteins, chemicals, soulful machines and robots that perform a machine are no different from speech".
"Therefore, these capabilities, these token generators, are a completely new category, a new industry. So we say there is an industrial revolution happening because it's new. And this new industry creates these rooms, these buildings, I call them artificial intelligence factories because it makes sense," he added.
"There's nothing easy about ChatGPT," Huang said. "It's one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs ever, and this software is very, very large and it's growing. And the reason for that is because there are so many different things you want to learn today. It learns from words and images. More and more it's learning from videos. It's going to learn about reinforcement learning. The model is going to learn about reinforcement learning, that is, one thing with another. It will learn through one argument with another like AlphaGo. It's going to learn in many different ways. And so these models are getting more sophisticated over time."