Canzano: Oregon State should marry football and Nvidia
Could the football hire involve Jensen Huang's company?
I understand why Jensen Huang hasn’t been interested in Oregon State football, but fostering a fan is sort of like raising a teenager — you have to meet them where they are.
The Nvidia founder and his wife, Lori, both graduated from Oregon State. They gave $50 million to the OSU Foundation. That gift is fueling the construction of the new campus innovation complex that will employ an Nvidia supercomputer.
World’s fastest computer?
Powerful enough to train the largest artificial intelligence models?
Billed by the campus news release as a tool to support faculty in “addressing highly complex and challenging computational problems”?
Oregon State needs a football coach. It happens to be a highly complex and challenging computational hire. Athletic Director Scott Barnes has assembled a hiring committee, contracted with a search firm, but the move OSU truly needs to make involves Huang, Nvidia, and some fresh thinking.
I’ve reached out to Huang a couple of times. I’d love to talk with him for an interview about his time in Corvallis, the gift he made to his alma mater, his vision, and the world of artificial intelligence. Nvidia’s public relations team has, so far, acted like a five-star offensive line, shielding him from a 1-on-1 interview with me.