Nov 17, 2024, 10:14 AM IST
Jensen Huang, 61, founder of Nvidia, is a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software. His company also designs and supplies GPUs, APIs, and SoCs.
Born on 17 February 1963 in Taiwan, Jensen Huang’s humble beginnings shaped his work ethic and leadership style, making him one of the world’s richest individuals with a net worth of $111 billion.
Huang immigrated to the United States from Taiwan as a young boy and grew up in Oregon. In his early days, he worked at Denny’s as a dishwasher and eventually moved up to busboy and waiter.
He completed his master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Between 1983 and 1993, he worked as a director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
He set up the Nvidia company along with his two friends, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. The three men founded the company in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner in East San Jose.
Jensen's Nvidia was first specialised in graphics processing units(GPU) associated with video and computer games. It got the first-mover advantage in the space and soon realised itself among the big chip makers.
Nvidia’s revenues further accelerated during the pandemic as the companies shifted to remote work. The surge in demand for cloud-based computing and increased interest in video games boosted Nvidia's growth in 2020.
Nvidia later positioned itself as the go-to source for companies when world business began increasingly banking on AI. The company provided businesses with massive computing power to handle their AI needs.
Since then Nvidia witnessed stratospheric growth, with its market capitalisation hitting $3 trillion. It has emerged to be the second-largest publicly traded U.S. company, trailing Microsoft.