Jensen Huang in Taiwan: "the more you buy, the more you make"
Key points
Key takeaways from a Lex Fridman podcast episode with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, filmed around Computex in Taipei (October 2026):
Rubin racks in full production. Nvidia's next-generation systems are now 100% liquid cooled — up from 80% for Grace Blackwell — and rack assembly time has fallen from two hours to five minutes. Huang pitches the Vera CPU at 1.8x the performance of x86.
The token economy. Huang argues AI changes compute economics: customers no longer rent cores but sell tokens, so the machine that moves through the inference loop fastest wins. "The more you buy, the more you make."
Taiwan is part of the build-out. "If we're going to build and sell a few trillion dollars of computing over the next several years, this entire island has to be part of it" — he says every company in the ecosystem will need to invest hundreds of billions.
How Taiwan won semiconductors. He traces it to K. T. Li's 1950s industrial vision, Philips spinning off the fab that became TSMC and the equipment business that became ASML, and IBM opening up its PC chipset specification — which let Taiwanese chipset makers, and later Dell, ride the PC revolution.
How TSMC happened. Huang recounts finding TSMC's US office number in the Yellow Pages when it was a roughly $300 million company and calling — only to reach a recording. He left his name and number, called several more times, and got no callback, so he wrote Morris Chang a long letter. One evening, Chang called him personally — "Hey, guys, shut up, it's Morris Chang," Huang recalls telling his staff, who were playing the original PlayStation nearby. Chang invited him to Taiwan, where he visited both UMC and TSMC; he chose TSMC because Chang spent the whole conversation on governance, integrity and long-term partnership rather than anything transactional, and promised, "Jensen, if we were to work together, I promise you we would jump through hoops for you." Huang says TSMC has done exactly that for 30 years.
SK Hynix's memory edge. At SK Hynix, a trillion-dollar company, Huang highlights the HBM leader's breakthrough bringing LPDDR memory into data centres: twice the bandwidth at half the power.
Reindustrialising America. The AI boom, he says, is "our best chance to invest in the grid, invest in sustainable energy, invest in manufacturing again"; he credits TSMC for sending engineers to its Arizona fabs and calls Taiwan a strategic partner in rebuilding US manufacturing.
Roots and humility. Huang reflects on the humility of engineers across Taiwan and China — "no matter how high you are, don't let your feet leave the ground" — and on gaming as Nvidia's root: "that's where we all begin."
Read more: YouTube · Business Insider
