Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang was born on February 17, 1963, in Tainan, Taiwan, and spent his early childhood there before moving to Thailand with his family, where his father worked on an oil refinery project. At age nine, he immigrated to the United States, living as a student in Kentucky and Oregon; during this time, he worked as a janitor, dishwasher, and busboy at a Denny's restaurant to support himself, experiences that later shaped Nvidia's principles of bold risk-taking and opportunity. He pursued higher education, earning a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master's from Stanford University. In the early 1990s, after business slowed at Sun Microsystems, Huang teamed up with engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to start a graphics chip company for PC games. They incorporated Nvidia on April 5, 1993, with just $600 in initial capital—$200 from each founder—naming it after the Latin word invidia (envy) to make competitors 'green with envy.' Huang, at 30, became president and CEO from day one, as his co-founders deferred to his leadership; the company began operations from a Denny's booth where Huang had worked. Huang navigated Nvidia through near-bankruptcies in the 1990s, pivoting to high-performance 3D graphics processors and creating the PC gaming market through software libraries and developer evangelism. He expanded beyond graphics into general-purpose computing with CUDA in 2006—a software layer enabling GPUs for neural networks—which initially met silence and tanked the stock, but proved pivotal for AI. Nvidia grew into AI supercomputing (e.g., DGX-1, personally delivered to Elon Musk) and full-stack infrastructure, making it the world's most valuable company by market cap under his leadership.