Before Nvidia, there was Dado Banatao

Every conversation you have had with an artificial intelligence — every image generated, every question answered, every medical scan analyzed, every self-driving decision made — passed through hardware built on a foundation laid, in part, by a rice farmer’s son from Iguig, Cagayan.

His name was Dado Banatao. He died on Christmas Day 2025 at the age of 79. The generation of Filipinos most directly living inside the technological world he helped build — the generation scrolling AI tools on their phones, working in tech, dreaming of startups — may have, for the most part, never heard of him.

This essay is an attempt to change that. Not as a tribute alone, but as an argument: that understanding how Dado Banatao thought is one of the most useful things a Filipino in the age of artificial intelligence can do.

The fox and the hedgehog

There is a concept in intellectual history, borrowed by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, that divides the world’s great thinkers into two temperaments.

The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.

Foxes move fluidly across domains — alert to nuance, sensing the terrain before maps exist, comfortable with contradiction. They are brilliant navigators. Hedgehogs reduce complexity to a single organizing principle and apply it with unwavering conviction across decades. They are brilliant architects. Berlin’s crucial insight — often missed — is that the most consequential minds are rarely pure types. They live in the productive tension between the two.

Dado Banatao was that rare combination. And understanding which he was, and how he held both, is the key to understanding not just what he built but why it lasted.

His hedgehog truth, the one conviction he carried across five decades applied to every problem he encountered, was this: intelligence emerges when burden is shared and friction is removed. It sounds almost too simple. But trace it through his work and you begin to see how deep it goes, and how far it reaches.

Dado’s question

A YOUNG Dado Banatao. Courtesy of Bernardita Quimpo

In the early 1980s, the personal computer existed but had not yet become personal. It was expensive, complex, and confined largely to institutions. Part of the problem was architectural: each machine required dozens of separate chips just to coordinate the communication between its own components — what engineers call the glue logic. It was a system carrying more weight than it needed to. Fragmented, inefficient, unnecessarily burdened.

Dado looked at this and asked the question he would ask again and again throughout his career: Why does it have to work this way?

In 1985, at Chips and Technologies — co-founded with Gordon Campbell and Ron Yara — he and his team produced the world’s first single-chip PC chipset, compressing that scattered glue logic into a single component. The effect was immediate and cascading: computers became cheaper to manufacture, simpler to build, affordable enough to leave offices and enter homes. The IBM-compatible clone industry exploded. The personal computer became, for the first time, genuinely personal. Chips and Technologies earned $12 million USD in revenue in its first four months, went public after 22 months, and was eventually acquired by Intel for approximately $430 million.

But the more important acquisition was this: a mass computing infrastructure now existed. Hundreds of millions of personal computers, affordable and proliferating globally, creating the platform on which the internet, smartphones, and eventually artificial intelligence would be built.

The hedgehog truth, applied to silicon: share the load, remove the friction, and watch what becomes possible.

Foundation of the AI revolution

The second wave came in 1989, when Dado co-founded S3 Graphics.

Computers were gaining visual interfaces — windows, icons, the graphical world we now take entirely for granted. But rendering those images was placing an enormous and growing burden on the central processor. One component carrying the weight of the whole system. Again: fragmented load, unnecessary friction, a bottleneck waiting to break.

Again, the same question. Again, the same architectural instinct.

At S3, Dado directed the design of dedicated graphics accelerator chips — silicon whose sole purpose was to take the visual rendering burden entirely off the main processor and carry it independently. By 1996, S3 was the dominant force in the PC graphics market. More importantly, it established something new: the commercial and technical viability of dedicated graphics silicon. A new category of chip, with a new kind of job.

Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993, four years after Dado started S3. He has spoken of his debt to Dado Banatao with the gravity of someone who understands exactly what he is acknowledging. The ground that S3 prepared — technically, commercially, architecturally — was the ground on which Nvidia built the graphics processing unit. And the GPU, it turned out, was not just useful for rendering images. Its massively parallel architecture — thousands of small processors sharing an enormous computational load simultaneously — made it the ideal hardware for training artificial intelligence.

The chain is direct and documentable. Dado’s hedgehog truth, applied to graphics in 1989, became the architectural foundation of the AI revolution of the 2020s.

When ChatGPT answered your question, a Nvidia GPU processed it. That GPU descended from a category of chip that Dado Banatao’s work made commercially viable. The Filipino fingerprint on artificial intelligence is not metaphorical. It is structural.

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Share the load, remove the friction

But here is where the fox enters — and where the portrait becomes more interesting.

A pure hedgehog, armed with one powerful truth, can become rigid. The conviction that served brilliantly in one context calcifies into dogma, unable to adapt when the terrain changes. Dado never calcified. He was a hedgehog by conviction and a fox by method — applying his one deep truth differently in each new domain, alert to context, never reducing the world to a formula.

Watch the fox move: from Ethernet networking in 1981 to PC chipsets in 1985 to graphics acceleration in 1989 to GPS commercialization in the 2000s to venture capital at Tallwood to education and mentorship through the Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev) and the Banatao Institute at UC Berkeley. The same underlying conviction — share the load, remove friction — expressed each time in a completely different form, responding to what the moment required.

The same mind that asked why a computer’s processing burden was so unevenly distributed later asked why a Filipino student’s access to opportunity was so unevenly distributed. The same architectural instinct that redesigned silicon circuits later redesigned the pathways between talent and possibility.

He did not abandon his one big thing. He humanized it.

This is what Berlin might have recognized as the rarest combination: a thinker whose hedgehog conviction gives him depth and direction, whose fox awareness gives him range and adaptability, and who never lets either quality overwhelm the other. Hedgehogs without foxes become rigid. Foxes without hedgehogs become scattered. Dado avoided both fates across five decades.

And it produced something unusual in the technology world: foresight that was genuinely calm. Because he was a systems thinker with one deep architectural conviction, he could speak about artificial intelligence early and presciently — not as someone imagining machines that would astonish us, but as someone who had spent 40 years reasoning about what happens when you remove friction from systems and share computational load wisely. He had already built that logic into silicon. He could see where it was going.

His message to young Filipinos

In the second half of his life, the fox carried the hedgehog truth into explicitly human territory.

His five success factors for technology entrepreneurs — a strong technical team, addressing a major need, a unique solution, a sound execution plan, and a solid financial framework — became the curriculum of the Young Banatao Learning Lab, a PhilDev program for scholars. Roland Ros, who co-founded Kumu — the Filipino livestreaming platform now serving the global Filipino diaspora — credits Dado’s mentorship and those five factors as instrumental to Kumu’s growth. They met at a PhilDev event. Dado shared the framework. A company followed.

HONORED. In 2021, the Philippine government issued a commemorative stamp featuring Dado Banatao, as part of the Living Legends series.

That is what the fox carrying the hedgehog truth looks like at human scale: not a lecture, not a donation, but a conversation that changes the direction of someone’s life and work.

His constant message to young Filipinos — my story could be your story — was not sentiment. It was architecture. He spent a career removing barriers from systems so that intelligence could flow freely. In his later years he applied that same instinct to the human systems — educational, economic, structural — that were preventing young Filipinos from becoming what they were capable of becoming. The scholarships were not charity. They were load balancing. The same logic, applied to a country.

I knew Dado Banatao for 46 years, through his wife Maria, whom I have known since 1963. I have spent years trying to understand precisely what kind of mind he had and why it produced what it produced.

The hedgehog and the fox is my answer. The more I examine his life and work, the more persuaded I am that it is the truest framework for understanding him — and the most useful one for the generation of Filipinos now inheriting the age he helped build.

We are living in the middle of an artificial intelligence revolution whose hardware foundations go back, in part, to the work of a man from Iguig, Cagayan. That is a fact worth knowing. But the more important thing to know is how he thought — because the problems the Philippines faces in this AI era are precisely the kind of problems his mind was designed to solve. Too much burden concentrated in too few places. Too much friction between talent and opportunity. Too much weight carried by one part of the system when it should be shared across many.

The hedgehog knew one big thing. The fox carried it everywhere it needed to go.

The question now is who carries it next. – Rappler.com

Bernardita Azurin Quimpo is completing, with the late Jamil Maidan Flores, a biography of Dado Banatao: From Cagayan Valley to Silicon Valley and Back Again.