What happened in this episode?
Lex Fridman documents a visit to Taiwan around the Computex trade show, spending extended time with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang across conference halls, staff events, and Taipei night markets. Amid the travelogue, Huang makes several business and policy claims. He says Nvidia has roughly 1,000 employees in Taiwan and is planning a new local building for about 4,000 staff, implying a further 3,000 hires. At Computex, Huang points to engineering changes he attributes to Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell systems, including a shift to fully liquid-cooled racks and sharply reduced assembly time, and he offers a simplified view of AI infrastructure economics: traditional hyperscale CPUs were optimised around renting cores, whereas AI operators monetise token generation throughput.
Huang also outlines his views on US export controls and US reindustrialisation. He argues that long-term security is better served by a technology-and-wealth ‘flywheel’ built on wide platform reach, and says restrictions should be highly selective rather than broadly isolationist. On manufacturing, he describes Taiwan as a strategic partner for US fab build-outs, citing the shortage of domestic talent and the transfer of Taiwanese engineers to help train staff.
The episode includes a detailed first-person account of Nvidia’s early approach to TSMC in the 1990s, including Huang’s recollection of writing directly to Morris Chang after initial outreach failed, and his explanation for choosing TSMC based on governance and long-term partnership values.
