Business
Jensen Huang
Co-founder and CEO of Nvidia
Born 1963
Photo: The White House · Public domain
«I don't like giving up on people. I'd rather torture them into greatness.»
Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has run it ever since, turning a maker of graphics cards for gamers into the company whose chips power the artificial intelligence boom. In 2025 Nvidia became the first company in history valued at five trillion dollars.
Key achievements
- Co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still leads it
- Drove the GPU revolution behind modern artificial intelligence
Universities
Stanford, California (next to Palo Alto)
MS in electrical engineering, 1992, completed while working as a chip designer in Silicon Valley.
Facts
- Born in Taipei, he was sent to the United States at nine and attended a rural boarding school in Kentucky where his chores included cleaning toilets; as a teenager he washed dishes at a Denny's.
- Nvidia was planned in 1993 over meals at a Denny's in San Jose by Huang and two fellow engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.
- He earned his Stanford master's in 1992 while working full-time; he and his wife Lori later funded the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center on campus, opened in 2010.
- He is known for his black leather jacket and for the Nvidia logo tattooed on his arm, which he got when the share price passed 100 dollars.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.