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The 84-Year-Old Man Who Saved Nvidia
By Ben Cohen
by Ko Sasaki for The Wall Street Journal
Updated May 18, 2024 12:02 am ET

It’s a $2 trillion company today. It wouldn’t exist without someone known as Irimajiri-san.

Before it was one of the world’s most valuable companies, Nvidia NVDA was a company on the verge of going out of business.

Jensen Huang’s startup had been around for a few years in the 1990s when it looked like it wouldn’t be around for much longer. Its first chip was a flop. Its next chip was doomed to fail. Huang himself says this was nothing less than an existential moment for his nascent company.

And it survived only because of a man he calls Irimajiri-san.

Nvidia was running out of money when Huang asked one of the top executives at the videogame giant Sega for a $5 million lifeline to keep his company afloat. There was absolutely no reason for Irimajiri-san to do it. He did it anyway.

“To his credit,” Huang recently said, “and my amazement.”
https://www.wsj.com/business/nvidia-stock-jensen-huang-sega-irimajiri-chips-ai-906247db?mod=hp_lead_pos10