Jensen Huang

At nine or ten, Jensen Huang was scrubbing toilets at a Kentucky reform school that his uncle had mistaken for a prestigious boarding school [2]. He and his brother had been sent over from Thailand alone, and the Oneida Baptist Institute took in children labelled "difficult" [2].

Taiwan, Thailand, Kentucky, Oregon

Huang was born Jen-Hsun Huang on 17 February 1963 in Tainan, Taiwan, the second son of a chemical engineer and a grade-school teacher [2]. When he was five the family moved to Thailand. His parents did not plan to stay, because of the Vietnam War. His father had once been accepted into a worker-training programme at the American air-conditioner maker Carrier and liked what he saw of the United States, and his mother taught the boys 10 English words a day to prepare them [2].

At nine, Huang and his brother were sent to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, while their parents stayed in Thailand. The uncle enrolled them at Oneida, in rural Kentucky. Huang cleaned toilets every day, his brother worked on a tobacco farm, and the other students bullied them [2].

About two years later his parents arrived in the United States, found out what the school was, and took the boys out. The family settled in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. At Aloha High School Huang played competitive table tennis and earned a national ranking, and he graduated in 1981 [2].

Engineer before founder

Huang studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and graduated in 1984. There he met Lori Mills, a fellow engineering student, and the two later married [2]. He moved to Silicon Valley and worked at Advanced Micro Devices for about a year, then joined LSI Logic, where he stayed from 1985 to 1993 and eventually became director of a division [1] [2]. He went back to school while working and earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford [2].

Founding NVIDIA

NVIDIA was founded on 5 April 1993 by Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, with the aim of bringing 3D graphics to gaming and multimedia [4]. Malachowsky and Priem, fellow chip designers, picked Huang as CEO [2]. The three started with $40,000 and soon raised an initial $20 million from venture capital firms, which Britannica says carried the company through a hard first few years [2]. Huang has been president, CEO and a board member since the start [1].

NVIDIA went public in 1999. Britannica reports that Huang later had the company logo tattooed on his left shoulder, after the stock hit $100 a share, and that he has said he probably would not get another tattoo [2]. The same year the company launched the GeForce 256. The Computer History Museum calls it the world's first graphics processing unit, a single chip that combined transform, lighting and rendering [3]. NVIDIA's own company history dates the invention of the GPU to 1999 as well [4].

From games to AI

Through the early 2000s, the Computer History Museum says, steady performance gains made NVIDIA the leading supplier of graphics chips for gamers and professionals [3]. Then the company began courting scientists. It released CUDA in 2006, a platform that let developers use NVIDIA GPUs for general computing rather than only for graphics [3]. Universities and national laboratories soon used the chips in some of the world's fastest supercomputers [3].

In 2012 NVIDIA GPUs powered AlexNet, the neural network that the company points to as the start of modern AI, and NVIDIA turned its attention to accelerated computing for AI [3] [4]. Chips built for game graphics turned out to be well suited to running machine-learning algorithms [2]. The museum's profile says most AI models today, from large language models to driving systems, are trained and run on NVIDIA technology [3]. In 2018 the company introduced RTX, which it describes as the first GPU capable of real-time ray tracing [4].

The museum quotes him calling it the technology industry's "single greatest contribution to social elevation" [3]. At NVIDIA's 2018 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose he said its GPUs were 25 times faster than five years earlier, outpacing what Moore's law would predict. The press named the observation "Huang's law" [2].

Recognition and philanthropy

Fortune named Huang its Businessperson of the Year for 2017. Harvard Business Review put him first on its 2019 list of the world's 100 best-performing CEOs over the lifetime of their tenure [1]. Time included him among the 100 most influential people of 2021 [2]. The Computer History Museum made him a 2024 Fellow, for leadership in devices and systems for computer graphics, accelerated computing and AI [3].

Huang and his wife founded the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation in 2007. According to Britannica it has given to their alma maters, to public health initiatives and to organisations in the San Francisco Bay Area [2].

The $5 trillion company and the 2025 and 2026 honours

In late October 2025 NVIDIA became the first company to reach a market valuation of $5 trillion. On 29 October its shares closed at a value of $5.03 trillion, and Fox Business noted that the shares had risen about twelvefold since ChatGPT launched in 2022 [5].

Six weeks later, on 11 December 2025, Time named the "Architects of AI" its Person of the Year. The Associated Press reported that the eight people in the group included six first-time recipients, among them Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman and AMD's Lisa Su [8]. Huang himself had spent a year at AMD after graduating in 1984 [2].

In 2026 the IEEE gave him its Medal of Honor, "for leadership in the development of graphics processing units and their application to scientific computing and artificial intelligence" [6]. IEEE describes the medal as its most prestigious award, and Huang was presented with it at the IEEE Honors Ceremony in New York City [7].