Jensen Huang

Co-founder and CEO of Nvidia since 1993 — the immigrant engineer who named the GPU, bet the company on CUDA through a decade of market doubt, and ended up owning the compute layer of the AI era.

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.

Notable achievements

• Co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as CEO ever since — one of the longest founder-CEO tenures in big tech.
• Steered the company through near-bankruptcy in the mid-1990s (the Sega lifeline and the RIVA 128).
• Marketed the GeForce 256 (1999) as the world’s first "GPU", naming the category.
• Made the long, market-doubted bet on CUDA (2006) that the 2012 AlexNet breakthrough vindicated.
• Built Nvidia into the central supplier of the AI era — crossing $1T (2023) and $5T (2025) market value.

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