What’s the secret to eternal innovation?

An interesting and highly recommendable article in The New York Times, “” caught the eye of this professor of innovation. It tells the story of how Intel went from being the technology company par excellence during the last decade of the 1990s and the first years of this century, designing all the chips, including Apple’s, that powered the rise of the personal computer and the internet, only to miss the AI revolution and fade into irrelevance.

How come? In 2005, , CEO of Intel, was very interested in buying Nvidia, then a company with not particularly brilliant finances, but balked at Jenson Huang’s asking price of $20 billion.

is currently valued at $3.43 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world along with at $3.48 trillion and ahead of ($3.16 trillion). About thirty times more than ’s current value. All of these are dizzying figures, but they underline what could have happened if, in 2005, Intel had acquired Nvidia and, as a consequence, remained in touch with trends such as AI. During the time when Intel was the practically undisputed core of every device, Nvidia was following its own path and developing graphics processing units (GPUs), doing well out of first the video game boom, cryptocurrencies, and finally, AI.