First Visit to NVIDIA

When he left Blizzard, it was still early.

Mike Morhaime saw him to the entrance of the parking lot.

"Give us a heads-up next time you come," Mike said. "We can prepare a little."

"No need to prepare." Nakayama Takuya walked toward the parked car. "I just wanted to see what your usual state was like. If you prepared, I wouldn't be able to tell. From what I saw this time, it was very good. You're walking the right path."

Mike stood where he was, finally understanding the purpose of this visit.

Nakayama Takuya got into the car and waved goodbye to Mike.

The day after leaving Irvine, Nakayama Takuya appeared in Santa Clara.

NVIDIA's office was not large, but it was a little tidier than the one in Irvine—at least there weren't takeout boxes piled up in the hallway.

As soon as the young man at the front desk heard he was from Sega, he immediately stood up and practically trotted off to report it.

Jensen Huang came out very quickly, and his handshake was also much firmer than the last time they had met.

That was not hard to understand.

Sega's capital injection last year had made NVIDIA's books look much better. Otherwise, when they negotiated that agreement with STMicroelectronics, who knew how many bargaining chips they would have had to give up.

The final terms settled on were: STMicroelectronics would obtain a license to produce a simplified version of NV1 and sell it under its own brand as STG2000, paying NVIDIA one million dollars a year.

Exclusive became non-exclusive. Just that one clause had taken nearly two weeks to negotiate.

One million dollars sounded like a lot, but in the chip industry, it was only a small fraction.

But being able to regain the non-exclusive rights meant