Extreme Co-Design

Extreme co-design is NVIDIA’s practice of jointly optimizing algorithms, software, chips, systems, networking, storage, power, cooling, racks, supply chain, and data-center design because modern AI workloads no longer fit inside one computer.

Key points

• Jensen says AI scaling requires refactoring algorithms, sharding pipelines, data, and models, and solving CPU, GPU, networking, switching, and workload-distribution problems together ^[src-065].
• The reason is Amdahl-like: accelerating only the compute part does little if networking, data movement, power, or software becomes the bottleneck ^[src-065].
• NVIDIA’s organizational design mirrors this: Jensen keeps a large technical staff across memory, CPU, optical, GPU, architecture, algorithms, power, and cooling, and problems are attacked in group conversations rather than isolated one-on-ones ^[src-065].
• Extreme co-design is also the mechanism for improving Tokens-Per-Watt Economics as power and supply-chain constraints become central to AI scaling ^[src-065].

Related entities

• NVIDIA
• Jensen Huang
• CUDA
• Nvidia Blackwell NVL72
• NVIDIA Vera Rubin

Related concepts

• AI Factories
• Tokens-Per-Watt Economics
• GPU Supply as AI Strategy
• Scale-Up vs Scale-Out Networking
• Belief-System Shaping Leadership

Source references

• ^[src-065] Lex Fridman – “Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494” (2026-03-23)