597: Jensen's 7 Nvidia GTC Highlights, Azure + AWS + GCP, Bifurcated Market, Autonomous Vulnerability Detection, AI Capex, Obesity Peak & Substance Abuse, Creatine, and Amadeus

"see for yourself what old-school VFX could do."

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

—Ernest Hemingway

📺🤡💰👮‍♂️🚓 Sometimes the best stuff comes from you, the steamboat crew.

Reader Ján Beňák saw my write-up on the film ‘The Town’ (2010) in Edition #594 and the film poster reminded him of Philips’ 2009 “Carousel” ad for its Cinema 21:9 TV.

Somehow, I had never seen it before. It’s pretty incredible, especially considering the technology at the time (this wasn’t done with NeRFs!). You have to see for yourself what old-school VFX could do.

Unsurprisingly, it won the Grand Prix at the 2009 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival 🏅

While the technique is impressive, the storytelling is also phenomenal. How much story can you pack in a single frozen moment?

There’s even a twist reveal at the end, where we can understand that one of the robbers has dumped his clown disguise and is now dressed as a policeman. And with every rewatch, you can notice more details, as every tableau is loaded with easter eggs.

If you want more info on it, check out this page.

🔌⚡💡🏗️ One side benefit of the AI build-out: everyone’s now thinking about compute in gigawatts, which may finally push serious thinking about system-level grid infrastructure beyond the project/local level and on a 10–20-year horizon instead of just 2–3 years.

This is long overdue.

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

😎 Mr. Jensen Goes to Washington: Seven Big Things from Nvidia GTC D.C. 2025 🤖🔍

As the biggest company in the world and the first to hit a $5 trillion market cap, Nvidia now has many of the same concerns as a nation-state. They used to worry about video game engines, frame rates, and which first-person shooter would be the next blockbuster, but now they have to worry about geopolitics, global supply chains, and export controls.

So unsurprisingly, the latest GTC was held in Washington, D.C., rather than in San Jose.

It was a big one with important announcements and shiny new toys. Here are my highlights:

Jensen took some time to hammer home one of his latest talking points, which is “extreme co-design”. They want people to understand that Nvidia isn’t making “computer chips” or “GPUs”, but fully integrated systems with lots of different hardware, software, and service elements that all have to fit together, and are all being pushed forward simultaneously, advancing rapidly in lockstep.

It’s that combination that generates the pretty incredible generation-over-generation improvements in performance. A better GPU chip alone wouldn’t do it, you need better networking, better inter-chip-connectivity, better cooling, better software frameworks, better CPUs to feed the GPUs, better DPUs, etc.

He showed off Rubin, which is the generation after Blackwell. One of the big innovations is that it is “cableless”.

What does that mean?

Rubin eliminates the massive tangle of internal cables that plagued previous generations like the GB200/GB300. Those older systems required over 5,000 individual copper cables inside each rack to connect 72 GPUs together.

Rubin replaces all of this with a single large printed circuit board (aka midplane) running down the back of the rack, where compute and networking modules simply slide in and connect automatically through blind-mate connectors (like a sophisticated USB port that connects when you insert a card).