Insider says Nvidia almost sold itself to AMD, but Jensen Huang wanted to be CEO of the merged company

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Huang wouldn't play ball unless he could run the show

AMD's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif.
(Image credit: AMD)

Nvidia is one of the biggest players in the tech industry, with market capitalization exceeding that of Intel and AMD, but it turns out that AMD almost purchased it in the past. One former AMD engineer recently revealed that when Nvidia was an upstart, the company almost purchased it. He detailed Nvidia’s refusal to be bought primarily because Jensen Huang wouldn’t sell unless he was made the CEO of the merged company.

Hemant Mohapatra was an engineer at AMD in the mid to late 2000s, helping design the CPUs, APUs, and GPUs still in service today. He was there when AMD realized it had an opportunity in the GPU market but initially missed it. Mohapatra recently offered a selection of his memories of the time on X (expand the tweet above).

Among those, Mohapatra recounted negotiations for AMD and Nvidia to merge into one company. However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a long-term strategy of locking Nvidia’s GPU to the proprietary and closed-source CUDA model. Not wanting to give up that strategy, Mohapatra says Huang refused to sell Nvidia unless he was made the joint company’s CE).

AMD's then-CEO Hector Ruiz opted instead to purchase rival ATI, bringing the Radeon name under AMD’s umbrella.

Another long-time AMD employee, Phil Park, verified this recollection via X. While Park said he never met Mohapatra and has different opinions on several of Mohapatra’s recollections, “the anecdote about Jensen wanting to be CEO is true.” Park offers additional commentary on Mohapatra's recollections, especially surrounding AMD's early efforts to design and market multicore CPUs.

At the time, Mohapatra recalls, Nvidia was “just one of the little boys.” The company’s graphics cards were highly sought after by the most serious gaming enthusiasts, but ATI (later acquired by AMD) had more of the market share overall. Mohapatra said AMD “never thought of them (Nvidia) in the same league as Arm/Intel.”

That’s clearly changed, especially now that AI is in such huge demand. Nvidia’s GPUs and AI hyperscalers dominate that industry, and AMD is trying to catch up once again. The full thread Mohapatra posted to X is a very interesting and enlightening read, with plenty of insight into what was happening behind the scenes during the chip wars of the 2000s.

So. Where is Mohapatra today? After just more than six years with AMD, he went on to Google and then Andreeson Horowitz. Now, he’s a venture capital partner and consultant for technology startups in India. And Jensen Huang himself remains CEO of Nvidia, which is now one of the most important companies in the world.

Jeff Butts
Jeff Butts
Contributing Writer

Jeff Butts has been covering tech news for more than a decade, and his IT experience predates the internet. Yes, he remembers when 9600 baud was “fast.” He especially enjoys covering DIY and Maker topics, along with anything on the bleeding edge of technology.

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8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Notton
    It's amusing to know Hector Ruiz's bad financial decisions while at AMD striking yet again.

    From the consumer's perspective, it's difficult to judge if this was for the better. I would imagine Intel buying ATi in the NvidiAMD scenario.
    We might have gotten better iGPU on Intel faster, and NvidiAMD having less buggy drivers.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    Huang knew his worth.

    He was correct.

    Honestly I'm glad it turned out this way though. We ended up with open source drivers a lot sooner IMHO for video cards (Huang never would've let AMD do that if he ran the show) because AMD/ATi led the charge. That in turn opened up Linux to become arguably the little gaming powerhouse that it has become because it allowed Valve to bulldoze everything and clean it up.

    Vulkan (because, Mantle) flat wouldn't exist if AMD would've purchased Nvidia. It would still just be OpenGL. Or rather, Vulkan would be some closed up thing that Nvidia would've used to instead of make the whole ecosystem better, they would've used it to line their own pockets and lock people down.

    To that extent, while Hector Ruiz may not have made the best financial decision for AMD, his decision ended up making all of our world a better place. As a consumer, this is so easy to see.
    Reply
  • ohio_buckeye
    Wild in hindsight that this was almost a thing. But I remember owning a gigabyte am2 motherboard that I had for years that had an nvidia chipset. So you can imagine they were probably at least talking.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    ezst036 said:
    Huang knew his worth.

    He was correct.
    I'm not sure that's not only true in hindsight. If someone tries something with a 1-in-100 chance of success and it works out for them, you might consider them a genius. However, maybe it was more luck than skill?

    In a recent interview, Huang said Nvidia was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy numerous times. I'm not sure if any of them occurred around or after when this acquisition would've happened. If they had encountered a string of bad luck (i.e. a few more incidents like bumpgate), then we might look back on this missed opportunity to be acquired with a similar opinion as the decisions leading to 3Dfx's demise.

    ezst036 said:
    Honestly I'm glad it turned out this way though. We ended up with open source drivers a lot sooner IMHO for video cards (Huang never would've let AMD do that if he ran the show) because AMD/ATi led the charge. That in turn opened up Linux to become arguably the little gaming powerhouse that it has become because it allowed Valve to bulldoze everything and clean it up.

    Vulkan (because, Mantle) flat wouldn't exist if AMD would've purchased Nvidia. It would still just be OpenGL. Or rather, Vulkan would be some closed up thing that Nvidia would've used to instead of make the whole ecosystem better, they would've used it to line their own pockets and lock people down.
    Maybe Vulkan would've looked different, but it was clear that the stakeholders in OpenGL really wanted to go a different direction. Perhaps Mantle set the technical direction of Vulkan, but I think the driving force behind it was actually Google, and I doubt AMD's ownership of Nvidia would've changed that.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    ohio_buckeye said:
    Wild in hindsight that this was almost a thing. But I remember owning a gigabyte am2 motherboard that I had for years that had an nvidia chipset. So you can imagine they were probably at least talking.
    Not only that, but AMD's color scheme used to be black, white, and green. I know it's a superficial thing, but it would've gone well with Nvidia's.
    Reply
  • BioBotJo
    What is most obvious, is that so few people know how business really works, especially business in this age of such massive (and covert) asset consolidation/concentration.
    The largest shareholders of AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) include:
    Vanguard, Black Rock, State Street, Fidelity (FMR), Geode, Morgan Stanley, and other of the largest Big Asset Management Firms, which also largely exist as the largest shareholders/investors of each other.
    Like a true cartel.
    Ditto,
    The largest shareholders of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) include:
    Vanguard, Black Rock, State Street, Fidelity (FMR), Geode, Morgan Stanley, and other of the largest Big Asset Management Firms, which also largely exist as the largest shareholders/investors of each other.
    Like a true cartel.

    This Cartel group of Big Asset Management firms now exist as the largest holders of the largest "competing" companies, in most every single industry.

    Most any semblance of a true free market economy is dead.
    These firms are not true competitors, but more subsidiaries of the same Big Asset shareholders.
    And the general public, their captive consumers.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    BioBotJo said:
    What is most obvious, is that so few people know how business really works,
    You have yet to demonstrate that you're any different.

    BioBotJo said:
    Most any semblance of a true free market economy is dead.
    Except you failed to provide any evidence or argument to that effect. For this to be true, these investors would need to have seats on both boards and try to use those seats to keep the companies from competing against each other. This would violate anti-competition laws and land those investment firms in big trouble. It would open the companies they own and perhaps even the ones they work for to lawsuits from other investors, because the standard corporate charter stipulates that the company and its executives must work in the interest of the shareholders.

    BioBotJo said:
    These firms are not true competitors, but more subsidiaries of the same Big Asset shareholders.
    And the general public, their captive consumers.
    Like a typical conspiracy theorist, you cannot distinguish between the mere appearance of a conflict of interest vs. an actual conspiracy. You just skip over steps 2 & 3, and just jump to the most shocking conclusion. I'm not impressed.
    Reply
  • dalek1234
    "Jensen wanting to be the CEO of the merged company, being the reason why the deal didn't go through" is not news. This info was reported on when the deal didn't happen all those ears ago.
    Reply