Jensen Huang is the founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, which in 2024 became the most valuable public company in the world.
Born in Taiwan, Huang was nine years old when his parents sent him and his brother to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington. At age 10, he was enrolled at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky — not the prestigious boarding school his uncle believed it to be, but a reform academy, where Huang was badly bullied. “Back then, there wasn’t a counsellor to talk to … you just had to toughen up and move on,” he said in a New Yorker interview.
When Huang’s family reunited in Oregon, he attended high school there, graduating at age 16. He earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, and a master’s degree from Stanford University. He then worked for chip manufacturing and semiconductor companies.
In 1993, at age 30, Huang cofounded NVIDIA with two friends during a meeting at a Denny’s restaurant. Primarily a producer of computer chips for fast-moving video games, the company struggled early on. “It didn’t matter to us whether people believed in us. We believed in ourselves. We had the courage to follow our own path,” Huang said. NVIDIA’s technology has since thrived, emerging as the engine behind AI (artificial intelligence).
Huang has been named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year, Number 1 on Harvard Business Review’s list of the world’s 100 best-performing CEOs, and — twice — one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.
