Nvidia's board of directors has sent Jensen Huang to a mountain monastery in Taiwan, where he will spend a full year cleaning dust from the cooling fans of the company's server racks by hand, the company announced on Thursday. The board said the assignment was chosen to reflect the seriousness of the company's position and the importance of humility among those who have led it.
Under the arrangement, Huang will rise before dawn, climb the monastery stairs carrying a soft brush and a bucket of isopropyl alcohol, and clean each of the 412 racks in the monastery's annex by hand. Monks have been asked to log every fan he restores in a ledger kept at the gate. The board's chair, Harvey C. Jones, said the ledger would be reviewed quarterly by an audit committee that meets in person, on foot.
Colette Kress, who is serving as acting chief executive, said the company's engineers have prepared a new training regime for the monastery's staff. Under it, each monk must now repair one GPU cooler before breakfast, and the abbot has agreed to sit on a rotating panel that evaluates the work. « We do not want anyone to believe that a chip can be trusted without someone climbing up to look at it », Kress said.
Shares of the company rose slightly on the news, analysts said, after falling more than ten percent earlier in the week. Nvidia is scheduled to publish its quarterly results on November 17, when the board expects to report the first figures for the cleaned racks.