INTERVIEW: Huang's Character Led Sega to Invest in Nvidia

Tokyo, Sept. 12 (Jiji Press)--Shoichiro Irimajiri, former president of what is now Japan's Sega Co., said in a recent interview that he had decided to invest 5 million dollars in then-fledgling U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp. in the late 1990s because he was impressed by the character of its CEO, Jensen Huang.

Irimajiri, 86, was head of then-Sega Enterprises Ltd. when he persuaded the company's top executives to rescue 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 with Jiji Press.

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 Inc.

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

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]