Build Zero-Billion-Dollar Markets

Huang’s phrase for it is a “$0 billion market” (the press tends to render it “zero-billion-dollar”). On the Acquired podcast in October 2023 he described it as “our way of saying there’s no market yet, but we believe there will be one,” and added that Nvidia “spent about a decade in $0 billion markets.”

The pitch. In his Caltech commencement speech on 14 June 2024 he said Nvidia “decided to build something where we are sure there are no customers.” The logic: no customers means no incumbents, no price war and no one to take share from, so the company is free to define the category.

At Nvidia. CUDA, robotics and AI computing were all pursued years before they showed up in the revenue line. The two plays below show how Huang turns the idea into practice: create demand rather than fight for share, and serve a need before it emerges.

Doesn’t transfer as a selection rule. “No customers yet” also describes most failed products. Nvidia’s own NV1 was a product aimed at a real PC-graphics market that bet on the wrong technology and missed. The phrase is a retrospective label for bets that worked, used by a company that could afford to wait a decade. For a startup, an empty market is usually empty for a reason.