CEOs of big tech companies often get together for promotional duties and PR events. Such meetings usually involve talking about a new project they're working on or an investment of some kind worth billions of dollars. So, when Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia got together for a recent "jersey-swap" on Instagram, you wouldn't expect more to come of it. Not so for Zuckerberg who, in response to a comment on the photo, described Huang as being like Taylor Swift. A tech version, of course.
Zuckerberg's slightly odd but flattering description was reported by Fortune, which explains that Meta's CEO was replying to a comment that said 'I don't know who that is but I'm glad you're having fun.'
The other person in question was, of course, Jen-Hsun Huang—the co-founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia. It's perfectly understandable that not everyone will recognise his face, even if they know about the company, be it through owning a GeForce graphics card or just reading about AI news on the web. Even my partner, who's very tech savvy, asked me who he was.
So if you had to describe who he was or why he's famous or important, what short one-liner would you go with? Over to Mark Zuckerberg: 'He’s like Taylor Swift, but for tech.' I can imagine that some people will just be cringing over such a comment, but I suspect Zuckerberg had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote that.
To be fair to Meta's CEO, it's not an entirely bad comparison. Both are globally recognised (though I suspect far more people would be able to identify Taylor Swift) and are very successful in their respective fields. They started from scratch and worked hard over the years to build their fortunes.
Though I've tried to picture Huang as a global music star—replete with a spangly outfit and energetic dance troupe, singing 'Shake it off' to a crowd of fans waving their beloved graphics cards in the air. But yeah, it's not something that really works.
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Anyway, so why exactly are Zuckerberg and Huang so chummy at the moment? Well, it's all to do with Meta's serious research and investment in AI and to power all of that, it's being buying Nvidia's GPUs by the bucketload.
Last year, Meta had bought 150,000 H100 GPUs and is on track to double that amount by the end of the year. We're talking billions of dollars worth of chips here.
Nvidia's H100 has just been surpassed by the recently launched Blackwell B200, but it will be a while before Meta will be able to get its hands on several hundred thousand of those, as multiple companies have already been putting in vast pre-orders of the supersized graphics chip. I wonder if Zuckerberg was hoping to get a wee discount with the jacket swap photo op and cute description? Maybe if we all do it, GeForce graphics cards will come down in price. We can all dream, yes?
