Jensen Huang

Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang (born February 17, 1963 ) is an American businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nvidia.

The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Huang immigrated to the United States in his childhood. After graduating from Stanford University, Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 at age 30. In June 2024, Nvidia became the largest company in the world by market capitalization. As of June 2024, Forbes estimated Huang's net worth at $118 billion, making him the 11th 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 received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984, and earned his master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992.

Career
After graduating from university, Huang served as the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a 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.

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 50 direct reports, on the ground that people reporting directly to him "should be at the top of their game" and "require the least amount of pampering".

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 donated funds to start a classroom in Beijing Haidian Foreign Language Shi Yan School to accommodate 101 primary and secondary students from areas affected by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China. In honor of the donation, the students tied a red scarf on Huang to express gratitude to him during the donation ceremony and Huang presented kaleidoscopes to the students as gifts.

In 2022, Huang donated US$50 million to his alma mater, Oregon State University, as a portion of a US$200 million donation towards the creation of a supercomputing institute on campus.

Huang gave his other alma mater, Stanford University, US$30 million to build the Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center. The building is the second of four that make up Stanford's Science and Engineering Quad. Huang gave his alma mater Oneida Baptist Institute US$2 million to build Huang Hall, a new girls' dormitory and classroom building.

Awards



 * 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
 * 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
 * February 2024: Elected to the National Academy of Engineering "for high-powered graphics processing units, fueling the artificial intelligence revolution"
 * May 2024: recognized as A1 honoree by Gold House

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.