Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell recently engaged in a warm public exchange reflecting on the formative years of the personal computer industry. Both the executives traded nostalgic memories with Hunag highlighting Dell’s early beginnings and long-standing manufacturing ties with Taiwan. Praising the billionaire founder, Huang looked back on how the availability of Taiwanese PC hardware and chipsets opened the doors for entrepreneurial pioneers, singling out Dell as a defining success story and calling him the “pride of Austin. Recalling how Dell got his start in the hardware business, Huang outlined how accessible components enabled a young college student to launch what would become a global tech powerhouse.
Acknowledging Huang’s remarks, Michael Dell took to social media to thank the Nvidia CEO while sharing archival details of his earliest visits to Taiwan and the hardware behind his very first machines. Dell also pointed out how the global semiconductor landscape looked different prior to the rise of foundry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC): “It was based on a chipset from Chips and Technologies, they were produced in Japan at that time before TSMCs rise. I explained a bunch of this history in #PlayNiceButWin.”
Because of Taiwan PC chipsets were available to all kinds of companies, including this little kid named Michael Dell, “What started out as Compeq, IBM,.
He just bought motherboards from Taiwan, assembled them into a PC, bought an operating system, licensed an operating system from Microsoft and he became a PC maker,” Huang said.