84-year-oldSavedNvidia The Story of Hideyuki Irie

TapTechNews May 21st, The Wall Street Observer today released a blog post introducing the 84-year-old man who saved Nvidia - Hideyuki Irie.

Before Nvidia became the third-largest company by market capitalization in the world, the company encountered the biggest development crisis in 1996 (just 3 years after its establishment) and was on the verge of bankruptcy, and it was this Sega executive who generously bailed it out and saved Nvidia from the grave.

The relationship between the two sides originated from Sega Dreamcast. Sega initially commissioned Nvidia to develop a GPU for it. Although Nvidia's subsequent work in low-power GPUs may have helped the company produce more power-efficient chips, these low-power graphics processors ultimately failed to meet the specifications required by Sega before the release of the cutting-edge Dreamcast in 1998.

Nvidia spent a lot of time and money on R & D but had no acceptable results, which put Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in an awkward position. Finally, he confessed to Sega the fact that there was no graphics hardware they needed...but still, he demanded that Sega pay.

Nvidia's Dreamcast GPU made for Sega ended in failure, but Hideyuki Irie, who was then the CEO of Sega of America, still decided to pay in full according to the contract and finally invested 5 million US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 36.2 million Chinese yuan) in Nvidia.

Although Hideyuki Irie eventually stepped down from his position as a Sega executive (he had briefly served as the president of the entire company, not just the president of the US branch), this investment was then cashed out at a price of 15 million US dollars, helping Sega remain stable when withdrawing from the console gaming business.