Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang (born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese-born American billionaire businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the founder, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nvidia. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Huang moved from Taiwan to the United States in his childhood. After receiving a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he co-founded Nvidia in 1993 at the age of 30. In June 2024, Nvidia became the largest company in the world by market capitalization. As of November 2024, Forbes estimated Huang's net worth at $130 billion, making him the 9th richest person in the world.

Early life and education

Huang was born in Tainan, Taiwan, on February 17, 1963. His family moved to Thailand when he was five years old. When he was nine, he and his older brother were sent to the United States to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington. When he was ten, he lived in the boys' dormitory with his brother at Oneida Baptist Institute while attending a separate public school, Oneida Elementary school, in Oneida, Kentucky—his uncle had mistaken what was actually a religious reform academy for a prestigious boarding school. Huang's roommate at Oneida was illiterate and in exchange for being taught how to read, he taught Huang how to bench press. Several years later, their parents also moved to the United States and settled in Oregon and the brothers moved back to live with them. Huang skipped two years and graduated at sixteen from Aloha High School in Aloha, Oregon. While growing up in Oregon in the 1980s, Huang got his first job at a local Denny's restaurant, where he worked as a busboy and waiter. Huang graduated from Oregon State University in 1984 with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering. He would later receive a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992.

Career

After graduating from university, Huang served as the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and as microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In 1993, at 30 years old, he went on to start his own business, where he co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and became its CEO and president. The three men founded the company in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner in East San Jose. He personally signed Nvidia's original Articles of Incorporation on April 5, 1993. As of 2024, Huang has been Nvidia's chief executive for over three decades, a tenure described by The Wall Street Journal as "almost unheard of in fast-moving Silicon Valley". He owns 3.6% of Nvidia's stock, which went public in 1999. He earned US$24.6 million as CEO in 2007, ranking him as the 61st highest paid U.S. CEO by Forbes. According to Huang, the three co-founders in 1993 had "no idea how" to start a company, "building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder" than they expected, and they probably would not have done it if they had realized up front "the pain and suffering [involved] ... the challenges [they were] going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that [would] go wrong." For its first graphics accelerator chips, Nvidia focused on rendering quadrilateral primitives (forward texture mapping) instead of the triangle primitives preferred by its competitors, and barely survived long enough to successfully pivot to triangles only because Sega agreed to keep Nvidia alive with a $5 million investment. By the time the RIVA 128 was released in August 1997 and saved the company, Nvidia was down to one month of payroll. This resulted in the "unofficial company motto": "Our company is thirty days from going out of business." Huang regularly began presentations to Nvidia staff with those words for many years. However, Huang regards the "pain and suffering" of Nvidia's early years as essential to the company's success in later years, because it forced him to become a better leader. Huang does not keep a fixed office; he roams Nvidia's headquarters and settles temporarily in conference rooms as needed. He prefers to maintain a relatively flat management structure, with around 60 direct reports as of November 2024, on the ground that people reporting directly to him "should be at the top of their game" and "require the least amount of pampering". He does not wear a watch, because as he likes to say, "now is the most important time". Historically, Huang and Nvidia were well-known only among the gamers and computer graphics experts who were the original intended markets for Nvidia's graphics processing unit (GPU) products. In 2017, a Fortune profile article acknowledged: "If you haven’t heard of Nvidia, you can be forgiven." During the AI boom, Huang's net worth rose rapidly along with the value of Nvidia's stock, from US$3 billion in 2019 to US$90 billion in May 2024. During this same timeframe, Huang became more widely known. In March 2024, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram with a picture of himself and Huang wearing each other's signature jacket: "He's like Taylor Swift, but for tech". In June 2024, Nvidia's market capitalization reached US$3 trillion for the first time and Huang's net worth grew to US$100 billion. By then, the news media was using the term "Jensanity" to refer to Huang's celebrity status in Taiwan, and it was compared to the "Linsanity" phenomenon of 2012. Huang was the center of attention at Computex 2024 in Taipei, even though he was not on the official speaking program. Large crowds of fans and paparazzi followed Huang and his family members around every time they appeared in public during their 2024 visit to Taiwan.

Philanthropy

In 2008, Nvidia contributed funds to establish a classroom at the Beijing Haidian Foreign Language Shi Yan School to cater to 101 elementary and middle school students from regions affected by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China. As a gesture of appreciation for the donation, the students ceremoniously bestowed a red scarf upon Huang, symbolizing their gratitude towards him. In return, Huang gifted kaleidoscopes to the students as a gesture of appreciation during the donation ceremony. In addition, Huang also provided a donation of US$30 million to his former university, Stanford University, in order to establish the Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center. The building is the second of four that make up Stanford's Science and Engineering Quad. In 2019, Huang donated $2 million to his former school, Oneida Baptist Institute, for the construction of Huang Hall, a modern facility that serves as a dormitory and classroom building for female students. In 2022, Huang gifted US$50 million to his alma mater, Oregon State University, as part of a larger US$200 million philanthropic contribution to establish a cutting-edge supercomputing institute on the university campus.

Awards

Personal life

While at Oregon State University, Huang met his future wife, Lori Mills, who was his engineering lab partner at the time. They have two children, Spencer Huang and Madison Huang. Spencer launched a bar in Taipei in 2015 that was honored as one of the top 50 bars in Asia by Forbes. The bar closed in May 2021, and he is currently a product manager at Nvidia. Madison previously worked in the hotel industry and is currently director of product marketing at Nvidia. The Huang family lived in ordinary middle-class starter homes in San Jose before Nvidia went public in 1999. In 2003, they moved to a larger house in Los Altos Hills, California and in 2004 they acquired a second home in Wailea, Hawaii. In 2017, a limited liability company reportedly linked to the Huangs acquired a mansion in San Francisco for $38 million. Huang and AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su are relatives. Huang's mother is the youngest sister of Su's maternal grandfather, making them first cousins, once removed. Huang and Charles Liang, co-founder of Supermicro, are longtime friends. Both companies were established in 1993 and have collaborated on products, with the latter utilizing Nvidia AI chips in its servers.