On January 20th, according to photos posted by several NVIDIA Chinese employees on social media, NVIDIA founder and CEO Huang Renxun recently attended the company's annual meeting in Shanghai. He also put on the traditional "Northeast Big Flower" and performed Yangko at the annual meeting.
The reporter from First Financial News learned that Huang Renxun's "confidentiality work" was very effective in the early stage of his trip to China, and it was not until January 20th that employees publicly shared photos on social media. At this time, Huang Renxun had already arrived in Taipei, China.
It is reported that Huang Renxun does not shy away from exposing his itinerary in China. He believes that "happy times should be shared with everyone.". This allowed employees to let go of their concerns and make the photos of the annual meeting public online.
Huang Renxun's visit to Chinese Mainland is the first since the COVID-19 in 2020, so it has attracted much attention.
However, NVIDIA confirmed to First Financial reporters that Huang Renxun's itinerary this time did not involve meetings with government officials or major commercial releases, and the main purpose was to "enjoy good times" with Chinese employees.
An employee of NVIDIA Beijing stated that Huang Renxun's visit this time was mainly to express condolences to everyone for their hard work and to pay New Year's greetings to the employees.
Nvidia has nearly 3000 employees in Chinese Mainland. Nvidia told First Financial reporters that prior to the pandemic, Huang Renxun also had the habit of inspecting offices across China at the end of the year. It is reported that in addition to Taipei and Hong Kong, Nvidia has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, with teams covering multiple functional departments such as marketing, sales, and research and development.
China is one of NVIDIA's most important markets, accounting for approximately a quarter of NVIDIA's global sales. At the time of Huang Renxun's visit, Nvidia's business in China is facing uncertainty. In response to restrictions on chip exports from the United States to China, Nvidia released a game chip GeForce RTX 4090 D that meets export control requirements at the end of last year. Nvidia had previously stated that this chip is expected to be shipped to Chinese customers this month.
On January 21st, a reporter from First Financial News found that a MSI Super Dragon GeForce 4090 D is currently available for sale at a self operated store on JD.com, priced at 15999 RMB.
However, there is currently no expected shipping time for Nvidia's other high-end artificial intelligence chip alternatives in China.
Boosted by the wave of artificial intelligence, Nvidia's stock price surged over 240% last year, becoming the best performing stock on the S&P 500.
According to Nvidia's third quarter financial report, due to the surge in demand for its GPUs from cloud service providers and internet companies, the company's revenue in the third quarter increased by more than twice year-on-year. Analysts expect similar growth in the fourth quarter.
In addition, Nvidia is actively addressing new challenges, such as releasing a reduced speed version of the chip for the Chinese market.
Industry insiders also have different interpretations of this. Some chip company executives told First Financial reporters that even if Nvidia's GPU slows down, it still has an advantage over many other competitors, especially thanks to its ecosystem of software and hardware integration; However, some industry insiders have also expressed that the performance gap between the slowed down Nvidia chips and domestic AI chips has narrowed, which may make domestic chips more attractive.