NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently appeared on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast. In the show, he reviewed NVIDIA's development history and revealed a little-known story about the company's first AI supercomputer, DGX-1.
Huang Renxun said,NVIDIA invested "billions of dollars" to develop the first generation DGX-1, but when it brought the product to the market, the initial response was "zero", no one wanted to buy it, and there were no orders.
Jen-Hsun Huang recalled: "When I released DGX-1, no one in the world wanted it. I had no orders, not one. Except Elon."
Musk said to Huang Renxun at the time: "You know what, I have a company that really needs this." Huang Renxun was immediately excited, and this became his first customer,The "non-profit AI company" Musk mentioned is OpenAI.
"I boxed up one (DGX-1), I drove it to San Francisco, and I delivered it to Elon in 2016," Huang said.
At that time, AI computing had not yet become mainstream, and the focus was still on the CPU. This explained the reason for the early failure of DGX-1. Nine years later, in 2025,Huang Renxun personally flew to Musk's interstellar base and delivered the latest DGX Spark mini supercomputer to him.