2008 People's Daily interview resurfaces: Jensen Huang on why 'beating rivals was never the goal'

dotey · x · 2026-11-13

dotey resurfaced a January 2008 People's Daily interview with Jensen Huang, with a photo of the original newspaper page. Key points:

Rivals were never the target: Huang said many companies treated NVIDIA as a rival from day one, but "they could fall and I might never know such a rival existed." Rivals don't tell you where to focus R&D or what customers need — those two things are what keep a company alive.
Deliberate differentiation was also a mistake: he reflected that early on he erred not by copying rivals but by deliberately building products completely different from them, calling both equally unforgivable because the focus lands on rivals instead of customers.
NVIDIA was never a chip company: he framed it as "a company that helps customers solve complex visual computing problems," which is why film, gaming and healthcare all became core businesses — "none of those problems belong to rivals; they all belong to customers."

Reading this 18 years later, given NVIDIA's current position, makes for a striking contrast.

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