Jensen Huang: from lavatory cleaner to the $1 trillion chip king of Silicon Valley
Artificial intelligence, in case you hadn’t heard, is about to take your job, upend society and, after that, perhaps destroy all humanity. And the man who has thrust us into this head-spinning new age? A Taiwanese immigrant who used to clean lavatories.
Until last month, most people outside Techland would not have heard of Jensen Huang. Nor would most people have heard of Nvidia, the company he founded. Yet Nvidia is now one of the most valuable companies in the world. And Huang, if the hype is to be believed, is in the process of joining the software billionaires Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as a titan of the modern age.
Who is this overnight sensation?
When the pandemic forced Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) to hold a major product launch virtually, CEO Jensen Huang beamed video to promote the event from his kitchen, where he pulled the company's latest chip out of his oven.
"I've got something I've gotta show you," Huang says while reaching for a pot holder. "This has been cooking for a while," he says before grunting to lift a circuit board the size of a baking sheet from the oven to show "the world's largest graphics card."
That's the type of showmanship that has turned the Taiwanese-American immigrant, who typically wears a black leather motorcycle jacket for product launches, into one of the best known names in the computing business.
On Tuesday, he joined an elite list of tech executives to head a company worth $1 trillion.
Huang, 60, is only the second U.S. CEO after Amazon.com Inc's (AMZN.O) Jeff Bezos, who helmed the retailer until 2021, to hit such a milestone for a company they co-founded.
There are few CEOs this side of late Apple Inc chief Steve Jobs who are so synonymous with their companies. Huang even has a tattoo inspired by Nvidia's logo on one arm.
Nvidia chips have been at the heart of major tech tends from video games to self-driving cars, to cloud computing, and now AI - artificial intelligence.
The company's shares have been on a tear, rising on stellar sales projections from a boom in AI. Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022, Nvidia's value has ballooned from roughly $420 billion to its current level.
Huang's success stems in part from a desire to solve thorny computer science problems with a mix of software and hardware - a vision that has taken him three decades to perfect.
Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the United States as a child, earning engineering degrees at Oregon State University and Stanford University.
Huang is hugely popular in semiconductor powerhouse Taiwan and received a rock star welcome during a visit to Taipei this week for a trade fair, giving a keynote address on Monday attended by thousands of people, some of whom surrounded him for selfies after his two-hour speech.
In 1993, when he was 30, he founded Nvidia along with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky, securing backing from Silicon Valley's Sequoia Capital and others. Its first big hits were specialized chips to power high-intensity motion graphics for computer games called graphics processing units (GPUs). Even then, Huang did not think of Nvidia as just a chip company.
"Computer graphics is one of the most complex parts of computer science," Huang told an audience in Silicon Valley in 2021 while receiving a lifetime achievement award. "You have to understand everything."
By the mid-2000s, Huang and his team realized Nvidia's chips could be used on more general computing problems and released a software platform called CUDA to allow software developers of all stripes to program Nvidia chips.
AN EARLY BET
That kicked off a wave of new uses, including for cryptocurrency. But Huang recognized that university labs were using his chips for work in AI, a niche in computer science that held the promise of powering everything from virtual assistants to self-driving cars. He released a parade of chips for AI, and the bet paid off.
Nvidia also differentiated itself by outsourcing its silicon manufacturing to partners including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (2330.TW), bucking the model set by Intel, which is now worth a fraction of Nvidia's value - which was just under $1 trillion as of Tuesday's close.
"He has helped enable a revolution that allows phones to answer questions out loud, farms to spray weeds but not crops, doctors to predict the properties of new drugs - with more wonders to come," AI entrepreneur Andrew Ng wrote of Huang in Time magazine when the latter was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time in 2021.
