(CNN) — Jensen Huang and Lisa Xu both have that in common.
The CEOs of Nvidia ( NVDA ) and AMD ( AMD ) are not only two of the most powerful people in the global AI chip industry, but they’re also family.
This link was first recognized by Xu in 2020, and recently described by Taiwanese geneticist Jean Wu.
They didn’t grow up together, which might simplify things considering they’re now competing against each other in one of the world’s most watched fields.
Theirs is a family history rooted in Taiwan, an island increasingly caught between the United States and China as they battle for supremacy in the high-tech sector.
According to Wu, a former financial journalist who now focuses on investigating business families, Huang is Chu’s “Biao Jiu” in Mandarin Chinese. In Western terms you could say they are cousins separated by a generation, he explains to CNN.
To be exact, the granddaughter of Su Huang’s uncle explained Wu, who pored over public records, newspaper clippings and yearbooks and interviewed Huang’s closest relative to describe their relationship.
“We Are Distant Cousins” Su said with a smile.When asked at a Consumer Technology Association (CTA) event in 2020.
An Nvidia spokesperson confirmed that Huang is a distant cousin of Xu on his mother’s side. Huang declined to comment for this story, while Su did not respond to a request for comment.
Nvidia offices in Taipei. (Credit: I-Hwa Cheng/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Similar paths
The merger has become a hot topic for industry watchers.
In Taiwan, Chu and Huang, who were born six years apart and now have rock star status, the topic appeared in the local news. On the Internet, users Reddit Y Other forums They have echoed the coincidence, and sketches of what are said to be family trees have gone viral on social media.
“I was very surprised,” Wu said of his discovery. “I think Taiwanese people are happy because the world is finally seeing Taiwan.”
Christopher Miller, author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” said he was surprised at first.
“But in other ways, it’s not surprising to find two people of Taiwanese descent at the center of the chip industry,” he told CNN. “Because although Taiwan is far from Silicon Valley, in reality, there are no two parts of the world that are so closely connected in terms of family ties, business ties, educational ties.”
Taiwan has a long tradition of producing world-leading hardware, which underpins its economy, said Edith Yeung, general partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Race Capital.
Yung credits leadership to companies such as chipmaker DSMC (DSM) and electronics makers ASUS, Acer and Foxconn, which encourages many young people to work as technical engineers.
Miller echoed this sentiment. “For almost half a century, Taiwan’s economy has focused on electronics manufacturing, chip assembly, chip manufacturing, chip design, everything related to semiconductors. If you look at Taiwan’s economy today, semiconductors are the biggest export,” he said.
“That means when young people enter college and think about possible career paths, semiconductors are one of the most popular options.”
Su and Huang were no exception, although they were mainly raised abroad.
According to Nvidia, Huang was born in Taipei in 1963 before moving to the southern city of Tainan. Later, his family moved to Thailand for his father’s job at an oil refinery.
When Huang was nine years old, political unrest in the Southeast Asian country prompted his parents to send him and his brother to live briefly with relatives in Washington state, then to boarding school in Kentucky.
Su, for his part, was born in Tainan in 1969. He came to America earlier, moving to New York at the age of 3.
Although they both grew up far away from each other, they followed the same paths as adults.
They chose the same field of study in electronic engineering: Su studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Huang at Oregon State University and Stanford University.
Later, when they ventured into the murky world of semiconductors, they worked for different companies but shared the same boss.
Before founding Nvidia in 1993, Huang worked as a microprocessor designer at AMD. Su, of course, joined AMD nearly two decades later as a senior vice president and was ultimately credited with turning the company around.
He spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. (Robin Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
From relatives to rivals
Both executives now live in Santa Clara, California, and their headquarters is a 5-minute drive away.
Its companies sell hardware and software to the world’s leading technology companies, an industry worth $1 trillion by 2030, according to McKinsey. In its latest annual report, AMD points to Nvidia as one of its main competitors in two of its four main business lines: gaming and data centers.
Both companies were known to gamers for selling GPUs (graphics processing units) that render video game images and help bring them to life. Although the two continue to compete in this field, their GPUs are now also used to create artificial intelligence, the technology behind popular systems like ChatGPT.
For example, Nvidia’s H100 GPUs were used by OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, to train its language model, according to the chipmaker. These components have been compared to AMD’s recently released MI300X, which it calls “the world’s most advanced accelerator for creative AI.”
It expects GPUs to bring in more than $2 billion in revenue by 2024, and the MI300 series is predicted to be “the fastest product in AMD history to reach $1,000,” AMD said Tuesday when it reported earnings. Stronger forecasts sent AMD shares up nearly 10% the next day.
The two also compete in selling equipment for data centers, physical facilities used to store large amounts of electronic information. To do this, computers use chips such as central processing units (CPUs) that help operating systems and programs run smoothly, and data processing units (DPUs) that free up space on computers so that users can multitask. Time. AMD sells both components to enterprises, as does Nvidia.
In recent years, these companies have gained widespread recognition for delivering cutting-edge technology that promises to transform society. The processors they make are increasingly used to power electric cars and artificial intelligence systems, bolstering a range that already includes almost everything from PCs to PlayStations.
“I would say that anyone who connects to the Internet has probably interacted with not just one, but dozens and hundreds of Nvidia and AMD chips,” Miller says.
“Most people don’t even think about AMD or Nvidia because they don’t see the chips these companies produce. But in reality, they probably depend on both Nvidia and AMD in their daily lives.”
Shares of Nvidia, a leader in the technology needed to train artificial intelligence in particular, have been buoyed by the rise of AI. As a result, Nvidia stock has seen a big rally, up 208% so far this year.
AMD shares are up 73% year to date in 2023, although the company is much smaller than Nvidia, Miller noted.
For her part, Su has become one of the highest-paid executives in the U.S., and last year was the highest-paid woman in the S&P 500 index.She topped both men’s and women’s lists. She also topped the index’s 2019 list of male and female CEOs, according to a joint review by executive compensation analytics firm Equilar and The Associated Press.
Both chipmakers, however, could see their fortunes change as geopolitical tensions continue to rise. Last week, Nvidia said in a regulatory filing that US export restrictions to China, affecting some of its advanced AI chips, had taken effect “immediately”.
AMD said in August it would comply with U.S. restrictions while trying to develop products specifically for China.
These concerns outweigh any poor family dynamics.
Asked by CTA in 2020 about his relationship with Huang, Su said: “I think Nvidia is a great company.”
“No doubt [de que] “The technological prowess they’ve demonstrated over the last decade has taken the industry into some of the most important areas of AI,” he added.
“It’s a competitive world, so there’s no doubt we’re competing hard. But it’s a world where you have to partner with your competitors from time to time.”
CNN’s Lindsay Knight contributed to this report.
