Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang is the co-founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA, a company that started building graphics chips for PC games and ended up powering the AI revolution. Under his leadership, NVIDIA became the first company in the world to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization.

Born in Taipei in 1963, Huang moved to the United States at age nine and spent his teenage years in Kentucky and Oregon, where he cleaned toilets at Oneida Baptist Institute and worked the graveyard shift as a dishwasher at a local Denny's. He graduated from Oregon State University with a BS in electrical engineering at sixteen, then earned his master's from Stanford in 1992 while working as a microchip designer in Silicon Valley.

Huang co-founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993, incorporating the company at a Denny's booth in San Jose with $600 total capital. The company nearly folded in 1997 after betting on the wrong graphics architecture, and was down to one month of payroll when the RIVA 128 chip turned things around. "Our company is thirty days from going out of business" became the unofficial motto for years.

Over three decades as CEO, Huang led NVIDIA through the GPU era, the CUDA launch in 2007, and the pivot to AI that made it the world's biggest public company. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in 2021 and 2024, and Forbes estimated his net worth at over $200 billion in 2026. He serves on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and received an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in May 2026.