Visiting Taiwan w/ Jensen Huang | Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman travels to Taiwan for the first time, accompanying NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to Computex and experiencing Taiwanese culture. The episode opens with street food exploration at night markets, where Lex and Jensen sample numerous dishes including oyster pancakes, fried rice, sweet potato balls, and various desserts. Lex emphasizes that Taiwan, despite being only one island, produces over 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors and is virtually impossible to replicate, comparable to ancient engineering marvels like Göbekli Tepe in terms of mystery and significance.

Jensen discusses NVIDIA's latest hardware innovations, including 100% liquid-cooled Grace Blackwell chips that assemble in five minutes (down from two hours) and the Vera CPU offering 1.8x performance over x86. He explains the shift in AI economics: rather than selling CPU cores by the dollar per core, companies now generate value through token output, fundamentally changing how customers evaluate computing infrastructure.

The conversation explores why Taiwan dominates semiconductors, tracing history back to K.T. Li's 1950s vision to bring technology manufacturing to the island, Philips' role in spinning off TSMC and ASML, and the crucial IBM PC revolution that opened chipset specifications, enabling fabless companies and entrepreneurs like Michael Dell to build businesses. Jensen emphasizes that Taiwan's culture deeply values engineering—one woman noted she learned to spell CoWoS before Gucci—reflecting how engineering is considered cool in Taiwanese society.

Jensen recounts his first contact with TSMC: leaving voice messages at their US office that went unanswered, then writing a letter to Morris Chang that eventually led to a phone call. He chose TSMC over UMC not based on capabilities but on Morris's philosophy emphasizing corporate governance, integrity, partnership, and long-term thinking. This 30-year relationship demonstrates Jensen's belief in choosing who to work with rather than what to buy, using 'rough justice' where both parties win over time rather than maximizing individual advantage.

The discussion turns to export controls and geopolitical strategy. Jensen argues that while protecting critical assets makes sense for concrete, finite resources like ammunition, technology leadership requires a different approach. He advocates for optimizing a 'technology-economic flywheel'—where technology leadership drives wealth, which funds R&D, which maintains technology leadership. He contends that isolating technology actually weakens long-term American competitiveness compared to maintaining platform reach and customer install base globally. Jensen emphasizes that English-language dominance and American tech stack standards give the US an inherent global advantage that shouldn't be sacrificed through decoupling.

However, Jensen also acknowledges the complexity: the question isn't whether technology should be restricted absolutely, but whether America flourishes with China in the flywheel or outside it. He argues for avoiding conflict through competition, maintaining relationships, and recognizing that every layer of the AI stack has different global leaders—energy, semiconductors, software—so complete decoupling is impossible anyway.

The episode extensively documents Taiwanese street food culture, with Jensen acting as knowledgeable guide, explaining dishes, their preparation, and cultural significance. He shares a childhood memory of being cut by a night market chef's knife at age five, which paradoxically created fond memories of the place. He and Lex discuss how food brings people together and reflects cultural values about generosity and sharing despite thin profit margins.

Throughout, Jensen emphasizes humility as a core value observed in both Chinese and Taiwanese engineers and culture. He notes that people in these regions work extremely hard without arrogance, and that goodwill compounds—when you want others to succeed, they reciprocate, creating mutual success. He attributes TSMC and Taiwan's ecosystem strength not just to education and engineering skill, but to fundamental generosity, kindness, and willingness to help others.

The conversation covers reindustrialization of the US, with Jensen noting the AI boom presents an opportunity to invest in grids, sustainable energy, and manufacturing. He points out that Taiwan is a strategic partner in US reindustrialization, sending engineers and investing billions to help build US fabs despite the talent shortage.