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Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s ‘Napoleon’ sees the chip company soar
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Jensen Huang’s appearance at this year’s Nvidia conference had all the attributes of a pop idol performing in his hometown. Demand was so great that some participants abandoned overcrowded buses and ran through downtown San Jose to watch the CEO’s speech. As they searched for empty seats in the 11,000-capacity arena, the music grew louder. Huang walked forward, dressed in his trademark black leather jacketand joked, “I hope you realize this isn’t a show.”
Over the past 18 months, Huang’s bet on artificial intelligence chips and software has transformed Nvidia into one of the most powerful companies in the world. This week, its market value briefly rose above $3 billion – only the third company in history to do so.
Huang is poised to become a household name, joining the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as one of the few tech CEOs the public might recognize. But even Musk has never been filmed signing a female top, how Huang was this week.
If he seems to enjoy the attention, it’s because it’s been a long time. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993, at age 30, and has remained at the helm for more than three decades. At 61, he is one of Big Tech’s last remaining founding CEOs.
“Jensen is an absolutely unique blend of kindness, intensity, ambition and relentless determination,” says Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of payments company Stripe. “He is Napoleon reincarnated with a big heart and a passion for semiconductor wafers.”
The demand for increasingly faster and more powerful chips has been compared to a global arms race, which Nvidia is helping the US win. But even the US is not immune to shortages. Supply is limited by the capacity of TSMC, the only Taiwanese company producing the next-generation Nvidia chips that drive advances in AI.
Nvidia chips are therefore considered a national security issue. Meanwhile, antitrust authorities are circling. This week, Jonathan Kanterhead of the US Department of Justice’s antitrust division told the Financial Times that regulators were looking at the competitive landscape for chips.
Nvidia’s CEO is unlikely to be surprised. In the Huang tradition, greatness can only come from suffering. Chris Gibson, chief executive of AI drug discovery company Recursion, which Nvidia invested in last year, remembers offering some encouraging advice during their first meeting. “He said, ‘Every start-up is in a constant state of death.’ You’re always fighting death and always fighting for relevance.”
Huang attributes his resilience to his childhood. Born in Tainan, southern Taiwan, in 1963, he arrived in the US at the age of nine and became the youngest boarder at a school in rural Kentucky. After graduating high school early, he attended Oregon State University to study electrical engineering, where he met his wife, Lori. The pair then moved to Silicon Valley and found jobs in the growing semiconductor industry.
This was a time when venture capital was flowing, PC sales were soaring, and semiconductor companies were experimenting with outsourcing manufacturing to Taiwanese companies. Together with two friends, Huang had the idea of creating a company specializing in designing computer chips capable of rendering realistic 3D video game graphics. They named their start-up after the Latin word for envy, invidia.
The first years were difficult. Only the success of the RIVA 128 graphics card, launched in 1997, saved the company from bankruptcy. Nvidia was listed in 1999, just before the dotcom bubble burst. It survived the share price crash during the financial crisis.
“Building a company and building Nvidia turned out to be a million times harder than any of us expected,” Huang told Podcast acquired last year. “If we had realized the pain and the suffering and how vulnerable you’re going to feel and the challenges you’re going to face and the embarrassment and the shame and the list of all the things that go wrong, I don’t think anyone would start a company. ”
Part of Nvidia’s survival may come down to its unusual structure. Rene Haas, chief executive of UK chip designer Arm, worked there in the early 2010s and says Huang built an organization that prioritizes projects over typical management hierarchies. This allows it to reach any layer to get the answers it needs. “It’s a unique culture,” says Haas. “The benefit of this is transparency and speed. And I think that’s one of the things that Nvidia is really, really good at. They move very, very fast, they are very, very determined.”
Huang sees the CEO’s job as someone who works on things that no one else can or does. In 2006, Nvidia began developing CUDA, the software ecosystem that helped expand the use of its graphics processing units beyond gaming. The advent of generative AI, which has boosted sales, validates this strategic shift. Nvidia has captured a highly lucrative market for data center chips that power the training and deployment of massive AI models used by companies like OpenAI.
Despite his long tenure, no successor has been identified. And Nvidia’s product launch schedule is still accelerating. Blackwell, a more powerful AI chip, has just been released, but the next generation is already in development. When the time comes, expect Huang to be the person on stage announcing its release.
Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw