Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, spoke about the recent controversy surrounding Nvidia and EVGA. As a reminder, EVGA has exited the GPU market, citing Nvidia’s handling of it as the reason.
According to Huang, the situation was much less dire than it first appeared and Nvidia was trying to protect its partners from the uncertainties of the current market.
Nvidia has had a turbulent week. First, EVGA announced that it would stop making GPUs, and Nvidia was reportedly the cause. Next up was the RTX 40 series, and the pricing of these GPUs left a lot to be desired. Finally, Jensen Huang himself confirmed that GPU prices would not go down any more. Now, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has responded subtly and forgivingly to the EVGA controversies.
As reported by Windows Central, Huang spoke to the press and spoke about both the EVGA issue and the export restrictions enacted by the United States government. Despite the difficulties, Huang seems optimistic that Nvidia is in for a good quarter and will prevail.
Huang confirmed that it was EVGA’s decision to part ways with Nvidia, but as he put it, that seems to have been the plan for quite some time.
Regarding Andrew Han, CEO of EVGA, Huang said, “Andrew wanted to do the deal and he’s wanted to do it for a couple of years. Andrew and EVGA are great partners and I’m sad that they are exiting the market but you know he has other plans that he has been thinking about for a number of years. And that was about it.”
Huang then went on to say that “the market has a lot of great players,” so it will continue to be well served even after EVGA’s departure. EVGA’s complaints about Nvidia relate to things like a lack of knowledge of architecture developments and pricing, and Huang addressed those issues as well, saying Nvidia is trying to expand its add-in board (AIB) partners ahead of the current market situation to protect. These include price increases and difficult sourcing of components given various supply chain issues.
During the pandemic, lead times to order a wafer increased dramatically; from 16 weeks to a year and a half. At the same time, demand for new GPUs increased dramatically. As a result, Nvidia ordered a lot of inventory in advance, but now the market has slowed. However, Nvidia hasn’t burdened its AIBs with the cost of the extra inventory it now has laying around.
Jensen Huang said: “We definitely ordered the components so that our AIBs are agile. And we carried most of the inventory when the market was really hot. Our selling price has always been the same, has never moved $1. Our component costs continued to increase, but we absorbed all increases. And we passed $0 to the market.”
Nvidia’s CEO also detailed the steps the company was taking to maintain its position and profits after market demand for GPUs declined: “The combination of the commitments we made resulted in that [Nvidia] Writing off inventory worth about a billion dollars. And second, we put a few hundred million dollars into marketing programs to help the station adjust its prices. I think between these two measures that we took a few months ago we should be in a good position in Q4 as Ada starts hard.”
Huang also seems unfazed by the recent trade restrictions the US government has imposed on GPU exports to China. Nvidia understands that the majority of its customers will not be affected by the new restrictions and expects to be able to comply while continuing to serve the Chinese market in line with current demand.
As Nvidia’s CEO puts it, it sounds like the EVGA situation may be less controversial than it first seemed. We’ve also heard reports that EVGA’s profits were much lower than other AIBs, which may have made the decision easier. However, we’ll likely never know the full story, and it’s hard to tell how much bad blood there really is between the two companies.
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