The business story
Jensen Huang (b. 1963, Taipei, Taiwan) immigrated to the US as a child, studied electrical engineering at Oregon State and Stanford, and co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. He has been CEO ever since — surviving a near-bankruptcy in the 1990s, marketing the first "GPU" (GeForce 256, 1999), and making a costly, long-doubted bet on general-purpose GPU computing (CUDA, 2006) that the 2012 deep-learning breakthrough vindicated. Nvidia became the central supplier of the AI boom, crossing a $1T valuation in 2023 and $5T by 2025.
Huang's habits favour candour and direct information over hierarchy.
Early life and background
Jensen Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1963, with family roots in Tainan, and spent several childhood years in Thailand, where his father worked as a chemical engineer. When conditions there grew unsettled, his parents sent him and his brother ahead to relatives in the United States. The boys ended up at Oneida Baptist Institute in rural Kentucky: Jensen attended the local public elementary school and boarded in the Institute's dorm, doing daily cleaning chores and sharing a room with a much older teenager he helped learn to read. Roughly two years later the family was reunited in Oregon.
He has described that period as formative rather than traumatic, and later helped fund a dormitory at the school. He went on to earn an electrical engineering degree at Oregon State University in 1984, where he met his wife, Lori, and later completed a master's at Stanford in 1992 while working. His early career was in chip design at AMD and then LSI Logic, where a graphics project for Sun Microsystems introduced him to his future co-founders.
Building Nvidia
Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem started Nvidia in 1993, holding early planning sessions at a Denny's in East San Jose. Their premise was that PCs would need dedicated 3D graphics silicon, with games and multimedia supplying the demand. Huang, the youngest of the three, became CEO from the start and has held the role ever since.
The first product, the NV1, clashed with the graphics standard Microsoft was setting and failed. By 1996 the company had cut deep and was close to collapse. A frank conversation with Sega, in which Huang conceded that Nvidia's technical direction was wrong but asked Sega to honour a payment anyway, kept the lights on long enough to ship the RIVA 128 in 1997.
In 1999 Nvidia listed publicly and launched the GeForce 256, branding it the first "GPU" and claiming the name of a category. In 2006 came CUDA, which opened the GPU to general-purpose computation. For years investors saw it as a costly distraction. The 2012 AlexNet result, trained on Nvidia hardware, changed that view, and from 2016 the data-center business became the company's center of gravity. Nvidia passed $1 trillion in market value in 2023 and $5 trillion in 2025. Not every move worked: the planned Arm acquisition was dropped in 2022 after regulators opposed it.
