Former Sega president recalls being ‘impressed’ with Nvidia’s Huong

Shoichiro Irimajiri, former president of what is now Sega Co., said in a recent interview that he had decided to invest $5 million in then-fledgling U.S. chipmaker Nvidia in the late 1990s because he was impressed by the character of its CEO, Jensen Huang.

Irimajiri, 86, was head of then-Sega Enterprises when he persuaded the company’s top executives to rescue the struggling Nvidia, which has since become one of the world’s biggest companies.

“I came to like Jensen Huang’s character, and bet everything on him,” Irimajiri said in the interview.

Sega contracted Nvidia to develop a graphics processing unit for the Dreamcast game console it was developing to compete with the PlayStation console released by then Sony Computer Entertainment.

But the development project failed and Irimajiri, who was chief of Sega’s U.S. arm, told Nvidia that the contract would be terminated.

Irimajiri said that Huang, who told him that Nvidia would go bankrupt without the contract, was “honest, passionate and deeply knowledgeable.”

“I had thought that it would be a waste to see him disappear from the industry,” Irimajiri recalled.

He proposed to Sega executives that the company use the remaining development funds to purchase shares in Nvidia, saying they should regard the investment as a parting gift to the chipmaker. He succeeded in persuading the company to put up $5 million.

Nvidia later changed its development approach after learning from its failure and released a GPU in 1997 that became its first major hit. This laid the foundation for the company’s subsequent growth into one of the world’s biggest companies by market capitalization, fueled by growing demand driven by the generative artificial intelligence boom.

Irimajiri, meanwhile, became Sega president and launched the Dreamcast, but the console struggled, and he became the company’s vice chairman in 2000.

He currently operates a management consulting business through his private office, and remains in contact with Huang. In July this year, he attended an event in Tokyo’s Akihabara district commemorating the relationship between Nvidia and Sega.

“It’s characteristic of him not to forget those who helped him even after achieving success,” Irimajiri said.