Serve the Need Before It Emerges

Huang put the stance plainly on the Acquired podcast in October 2023: Nvidia would rather be early than be asked. Waiting for a purchase order means arriving after the market has already picked its suppliers.

The OpenAI delivery. In August 2016 Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1, a roughly $129,000 AI computer, to OpenAI in San Francisco. Fortune reported his signed inscription, which ended “I present you the world’s first DGX-1!” OpenAI was then a young nonprofit research lab with no product.

What followed. ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022. Demand for Nvidia’s H100 chips surged through 2023, and the company touched a $1 trillion market value on 30 May 2023.

The same relationship, later. The OpenAI tie also produced a $100B letter of intent (September 2025) that Reuters reported in February 2026 was being replaced by an investment of about $30B, and, by August 2026, Nvidia guarantees of up to $105B on OpenAI data-center leases. See “Invest in Your Own Customers” for that side of the story.

Doesn’t transfer as foresight. Delivering a supercomputer to a nonprofit lab in 2016 looks prophetic because that lab later built ChatGPT, and Nvidia also seeded many bets that went nowhere. The repeatable move is cheap, early presence with the people most likely to need you, not predicting which of them will matter.