Nvidia’s Jensen Huang reunites with Sega exec who saved the company with $5M investment

30 years after Sega ‘saved’ Nvidia, CEO Jensen Huang reunited with Sega’s former president in a Tokyo arcade this week to celebrate a new partnership between the two companies.

Huang appeared at the original Sega Akihabara Arcade (now GiGO Akihabara 3), alongside former Sega president Shoichiro Irimajiri, current Sega CEO Haruki Satomi, COO Shuji Utsumi, and Yu Suzuki, creator of Virtua Fighter and Shenmue.

The two companies announced that Virtua Fighter Crossroads and future Sega titles will support Nvidia’s RTX Spark, a new line of all-in-one system-on-chips (SoCs) designed to run on slim Windows laptops and compact desktop PCs.

The announcement represents a full-circle moment for Nvidia, which is now the world’s largest company with a market cap of $4.74 trillion, but started its life as a startup supplying Sega with 3D graphics chips in the mid-90s.

The Nvidia NV1 chip, the company’s first graphics accelerator, powered the first Virtua Fighter game on PC.

Notably, Nvidia signed a lucrative deal in the mid-90s to supply 3D technology for Sega’s upcoming Dreamcast console, but due to poor technical decisions, it failed to deliver, putting the young Nvidia in financial peril.

However, in a pivotal moment, Sega’s president, Shoichiro Irimajiri, saw potential in Nvidia and agreed to invest $5 million into the company, which Huang later reflected had kept it afloat.

The $5m Sega investment that ‘saved’ Nvidia

“$5 million was a big amount of money for Sega at the time,” Huang said last year. “I told him that if they invested that money in us, it was likely to be lost. But if they didn’t invest that money, we’d be out of business and have no chance… he thought about it for a couple of days and said, ‘We’ll do it’.”

He added: “If he had kept that $5 million investment, it would probably be worth about a trillion dollars today… because the moment we went public, they sold it [for $300m], because they thought it was a miracle.”

At the Akihabara arcade event, Huang appeared on stage with former Sega president Irimajiri and expressed his gratitude.

“Sega, Mr. Irimajiri, Mr. Suzuki, your friendship, support, and belief in us mean a great deal to me,” he said, via Famitsu. “Japan has always been an important place to me, and Sega has always been an important entity to me.

“I hope that everyone at Sega will be as proud as we are of the history of this collaboration between NVIDIA and Sega that continues to this day. It is truly wonderful.”

He added: “Without the pioneering achievements Yu Suzuki accomplished here in Japan in 3D video games and 3D animation, the world of gaming today would be completely different. Without your incredible, pioneering work, today’s development would not have been possible. Thank you so much!”