Jensen Huang

The native form of this personal name is Huang Jen-hsun. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

In this Taiwanese name, the surname is Huang.

Jensen Huang
黃仁勳
Huang in 2023
Born	Huang Jen-hsun (1963-02-17) February 17, 1963 Taipei, Taiwan
Citizenship	United States Taiwan
Education	Oregon State University (BS) Stanford University (MS)
Occupations	Businessman electrical engineer philanthropist
Known for	Co-founding Nvidia
Title	President and CEO of Nvidia Corporation (1993–present)
Spouse	Lori Huang ​ (m. 1985)​
Children	2
Relatives	Lisa Su (cousin)
Awards	IEEE Founders Medal (2020) VinFuture Prize (2024) Edison Award (2024)
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	黃仁勳
Simplified Chinese	黄仁勋
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Huáng Rénxūn Bopomofo ㄏㄨㄤˊ ㄖㄣˊㄒㄩㄣ Gwoyeu Romatzyh Hwang Renshiun Wade–Giles Huang2 Jen2-hsün1 IPA [xwǎŋ ɻə̌n.ɕýn] Yue: Cantonese Jyutping Wong4 Jan4-fan1 Southern Min Hokkien POJ N̂g Jîn-hun Tâi-lô N̂g Jîn-hun
Website	nvidia.com
Signature

Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang (Chinese: 黃仁勳; pinyin: Huáng Rénxūn; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂g Jîn-hun; born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese and American businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the president, co-founder, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nvidia, the world's largest semiconductor company. As of December 2024, Forbes estimated Huang's net worth at US$124.0 billion, making him the 10th wealthiest person in the world.

The son of Taiwanese American immigrants, Huang spent his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand before moving to the United States, where he was a student in Kentucky and Oregon. After graduating from Stanford University, he launched Nvidia in 1993 from a local Denny's restaurant at the age of 30 and has remained president and CEO since its founding. Huang led the company out of near-bankruptcy during the 1990s and oversaw its expansion into GPU production, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.

Under Huang, Nvidia experienced rapid growth during the AI boom and reached a market capitalization of $3 trillion, surpassing Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. In June 2024, Nvidia overtook Microsoft to be the "world's most valuable company" with a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion. In 2021 and 2024, Time magazine named Huang as one of the most influential people in the world.

Early life and education

Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1963, and moved to the southern city of Tainan as a child. He is the younger of two sons of Huang Hsing-tai, a chemical engineer at an oil refinery, and Lo Tsai-hsiu, a schoolteacher. They were a middle-class Taiwanese family that relocated often. Each day, Jensen's mother randomly selected ten words from the dictionary to teach her sons English. When he was five years old, Huang's family moved to Thailand to support his father's refinery work and remained there for approximately four years. He attended Ruamrudee International School while in Bangkok.

In the late 1960s, Hsing-tai traveled from Taiwan to New York City to train under an air conditioning company and, after returning home, resolved to send his sons to the United States. At age nine, Jensen, despite not being able to speak English, was sent by his parents to live in the US. He and his older brother moved in 1973 to reside with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, due to widespread social unrest in Thailand. Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth, mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions in order to afford the academy's tuition.

When he was ten years old, Huang lived with his brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory. Each student was expected to work everyday, and his older brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm. Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English" and was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets everyday, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".

Two years after Huang arrived in Oneida, his parents moved to the United States and settled in Beaverton, Oregon, where the brothers withdrew from school in Kentucky to live back with them. As a teenager, Huang attended Aloha High School in Aloha, Oregon, where he excelled academically. He skipped two grades, graduated at age sixteen, and became a nationally ranked table-tennis player in addition to being a member of its mathematics, computer, and science clubs. Beginning at age 15, Huang also got his first job working the graveyard shift at a local Denny's restaurant as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter from 1978 to 1983.

After high school, Huang chose to enroll in Oregon State University due to its low in-state tuition. He studied electrical engineering and computer science and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1984 at age 20. He later recalled, "I was the youngest kid in school, in class" and the only student who "looked like a child". Years later, while working as a microchip designer in Silicon Valley, he concurrently pursued graduate night classes at Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1992.

AMD and LSI Logic

After graduating from college, Huang was a microchip designer in Silicon Valley. He had interviewed for positions at Texas Instruments, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and LSI Logic, ultimately choosing the California-based AMD due to already being familiar with the company. He designed AMD microprocessors while simultaneously attending Stanford and raising his two children. However, when he heard of new chip design processes at LSI Logic, Huang left AMD to assume a role as a technical officer at the LSI Corporation, working under a startup company, Sun Microsystems, where he met engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

LSI was in contract with Sun Microsystems and had introduced Huang to Malachowsky and Priem, who were working on a new graphics accelerator card. While the three produced the card's manufacturing process, the relationship between Malachowsky and Priem became strained as the two disputed the chip's design, leading to infighting; according to Malachowsky, they "broke every tool that LSI Logic had in their standard portfolio". In 1989, Huang, Malachowsky, and Priem finalized the accelerator, which they called the "GX graphics engine". GX was a widespread financial success; the sales of the graphics engine contributed to Sun Microsystem's revenue increasing from $262 million in 1987 to $656 million in 1990, and Huang was promoted to be the director of LSI's CoreWare, a division that manufactured chips for hardware vendors.

Nvidia

Founding (1993)

Huang founded Nvidia Corporation after meeting with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in a Denny's diner in East San Jose (pictured). As a teenager, Huang was previously an employee at a Denny's restaurant in Oregon.

When business began to slow for Sun Microsystems after 1990, Huang, along with Priem and Malachowsky, each resigned their jobs to pursue a venture together in making graphics chips for PC games. They initially named their new company "NVision" until Huang suggested that the company be named "Nvidia" based on the Latin word invidia, as Priem wanted competitors to turn "green with envy". The three met frequently in 1992 at a Denny's roadside diner in East San Jose to formulate a business plan. Huang chose for them to meet at Denny's due to his prior work experience at the restaurant chain and because it was "quieter than home and had cheap coffee". The three founded the company during one meeting at the Denny's diner at a breakfast booth.

To formally incorporate the company, Huang found a lawyer, James Gaither of Cooley Godward, who demanded the $200 in cash in Huang's pockets to capitalize the company. After that meeting, Huang went back to Priem and Malachowsky to ask each of them for $200 for their respective shares of the company, which meant that Nvidia's initial capital was $600. On April 5, 1993, Huang personally signed Nvidia's original articles of incorporation into effect.

Although he left LSI, Huang remained in good standing with the company and was able to secure funding for Nvidia from LSI's CEO, Wilfred Corrigan, who introduced Huang to venture capitalist Don Valentine. Valentine, the leader of Sequoia Capital, chose to invest in Nvidia, as did Sutter Hill Ventures. The funding enabled Nvidia to begin development efforts toward its first chip and to begin paying wages for its employees. By the first day of operation, Huang was made Nvidia's president and CEO. Even though Huang, at age 30, was younger than Priem and Malachowsky, both Priem and Malachowsky believed that he was prepared to be CEO. According to Priem, "we basically deferred to Jensen on day one" and told Huang, "you're in charge of running the company—all the stuff Chris and I don’t know how to do".

President and CEO (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.

Huang meeting with Narendra Modi in 2023

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

Jensen Huang at SC18

Jensen Huang in Taipei

• 1999: Named Entrepreneur of the Year in High Technology by Ernst & Young
• 2002: Received the Daniel J. Epstein Engineering Management Award from the University of Southern California
• 2004: Received the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award from the Fabless Semiconductor Association, which recognizes a leader who has made exceptional contributions to driving the development, innovation, growth, and long-term opportunities of the fabless semiconductor industry
• 2005: Named Alumni Fellow by Oregon State University
• 2007: Received the Silicon Valley Education Foundation's Pioneer Business Leader Award for his work in both the corporate and philanthropic worlds
• June 2009: Received an honorary doctorate from Oregon State University
• 2018: Listed in the inaugural Edge 50, naming the world's top 50 influencers in edge computing
• October 2019: Named best-performing CEO in the world by the Harvard Business Review
• 2020: Awarded the IEEE Founders Medal
• November 2020: Named "Supplier CEO of the year" by Automotive News Europe Eurostars
• November 2020: Received honorary doctorate from National Taiwan University
• August 2021: Received the Robert N. Noyce Award from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the industry’s highest honor
• 2021 and 2024: Was included in the Time 100, Time's annual list of the world's 100 most influential people
• December 2023: Named best CEO of 2023 by The Economist
• Huang was included in Time 100 AI list in 2023 and in 2024
• February 2024: Elected to the National Academy of Engineering "for high-powered graphics processing units, fueling the artificial intelligence revolution"
• May 2024: Recognized as an A1 honoree by Gold House
• September 2024: Selected as a Fellow of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).
• November 2024: Ranked No. 2 by Fortune magazine on its inaugural list of the 100 Most Powerful People in Business
• November 2024: Received honorary doctorate from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• December 2024: Received the grand prize of the VinFuture Prize alongside Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li for their groundbreaking contributions to neural networks and deep learning algorithms.
• November 2024: Awarded the Edison Award for "visionary leadership in artificial intelligence and transformative technology".

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 (Chinese: 黃勝斌; pinyin: Huáng Shèngbīn) and Madison Huang (Chinese: 黃敏珊; pinyin: Huáng Mǐnshān). 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. His mother is the youngest sister of Su's maternal grandfather, making them first cousins, once removed. Huang also speaks Taiwanese Hokkien, and has dual Taiwanese and American citizenship. He makes frequent visits back to Taiwan.

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. Huang is also a close friend of TSMC founder Morris Chang.

See also

• Huang's law

References

Additional sources

• Kae, Tim (December 10, 2024). The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-1324086710.

External links

• "An Interview with Jen Hsun Huang". Wired, July 2002. Volume 10, number 7.
• Nvidia Corporate Biography
• Jen-Hsun Huang (2015). "GPU Technology Conference 2015 - Leaps in Visual Computing". Retrieved March 26, 2015.