He is one of the great stars of our day. With 30 years of stubborn persistence he built the company that became the most highly valued of all time. When the moment comes to unveil yet another innovative chip, he turns into a marketing icon.
Jensen Huang grabs the leather jacket, steps into the spotlight, where he feels right at home, and the show begins.
Eastern wisdom meets Western polish. One of the richest Americans, the only one on the list who was born in China (…in a manner of speaking). His story arrives to show that even today strong personalities matter. It is worth walking his wonderfully curious path together, and hearing his views on the future we are all going to live in.
We Wash Dishes of All Kinds
“1978 – 1983 – dishwasher, busboy and waiter”
“1993 to present – founder and CEO of NVIDIA”
That is how our hero's résumé reads if you decide to look up his profile on the “professional Facebook”—LinkedIn. If you have never wandered into that social network, it is usually the place where people in IT raise the stakes and present themselves in the best possible light to impress their potential next employers. It is also the platform where, now and then, deeper and more meaningful conversations manage to happen, often with the participation of the people who actually make the decisions.
And yet, Jensen Huang washed dishes until '83, then did nothing for 10 years. Shortly before our triumph at USA '94—Bulgaria's legendary run to the World Cup semifinals—he founded a company that quite a few people only learned about in recent years, with the boom in artificial intelligence. How is that possible?!
This Year, Conductors
Let me hurry to tell you: it isn't true.
During the hiatus, the interval between the two jobs, he was preparing for everything that came next. Then again, Jensen definitely has a taste for presenting himself. At least in my modest bubble, since the days when Steve Jobs showed off the next technological breakthroughs, our hero is the first universally acknowledged master of the art. He made the leather jacket his trademark, grew used to the spotlight and to great expectations.
At the epicenter of the explosion in artificial intelligence were the companies developing one impressive model after another, led by OpenAI. But so were the companies on whose shoulders this enormous progress rests. Because the work of scientists in machine learning advanced generation after generation, while the technological limits often came from the capabilities of the hardware.
And then came NVIDIA. A company founded decades earlier to make chips for playing realistic computer games. Suddenly it turned out to be the lord of the most important ingredients, the ones capable of powering the next generations of artificial intelligence models.
Chip 'n Dale
Just how drastic was this change? NVIDIA became not merely the company with the highest stock market value in the world, but the most valuable company that has ever existed. Then it broke another record—for the steepest drop in market value. That happened on the day the Chinese company DeepSeek brought its new AI model onto the stage, showing that perhaps we are not quite so dependent on the most expensive chips to take the next big steps in AI.
Suffice it to add that, until then, the only companies ever valued at 3 trillion (3,000,000,000,000!) dollars were Apple and Microsoft.
And on that list… why is the name so hard to pronounce? It comes from invidia, the Latin word for “envy,” and NV, “next vision.” “Next vision” was a term the company used early on to label its files. Computer-nerd in-jokes, which nonetheless turned into one of the most famous trademarks around.
The markets have lost their minds, humanity has gone mad, you might say. But there is a reason. If we need a few more concrete figures: NVIDIA's sales for 2004 came to $89 million. This year the company makes that much in sales every… 26 hours!
黃仁勳
No, I am not insulting you with what I wrote above—that is our hero's name according to his first documents. Huang Jen-Hsun was born in 1963 in the Republic of China. What is that, you may ask—hasn't China been a People's Republic for quite a while now? Exactly. It is the official name taken by the island of Taiwan, home to Mr. Huang's native city of Tainan.
Life, however, quickly carried him to the other side of the Pacific, where Jen-Hsun officially changed his name, and so Jensen Huang was “born.” Today his personal fortune is estimated at around 120 billion dollars, which puts him very close to the top 10 richest people in the world. He owns about 3.4 percent of the company that is the newest unavoidable force in the world of technology (and in the rest of the world too, which lately is ever more tightly bound to it).
But how does this happen to a man who writes that, until the age of 30, his experience was as a “dishwasher, busboy and waiter”?! The American Dream in action, pure luck? Or a combination of enterprise, persistence, sensible decisions… and the right moment, when artificial intelligence became the world's number one topic and it turned out that its progress rests, to a large extent, on the very company Jensen created.
Kung Fu Panda
His father, Huang Hsing-tai, was a chemical engineer, and his mother, Lo Tsai-hsiu, a primary school teacher. When he was 6, the family moved to Thailand, to the capital, Bangkok. His parents, however, were looking east (yes, when you keep going east, even the West becomes the East). His father went to New York for training, liked it, and decided the future lay there. First he sent the 9-year-old Jensen and his brother, a year older, to their uncle. The family lived in a small provincial town in the state of Washington, where the children faced serious hardships.
An unfortunate mistake occurred. The uncle and aunt had read somewhere that they had chosen a prestigious school… and it turned out to be a boarding school for troubled kids. Jensen was made to clean the toilets every day, while his brother worked on a tobacco farm. In a town without many immigrants, the boys were bullied by their classmates, who not only insulted them but threatened them with knives.
A few years later the family was reunited in Oregon. Fascinated by computers since childhood, Jensen enrolled at the state university, where he studied computer science and integrated circuit design. So perhaps his experience before 30 wasn't only about serving and delivering?
His own joke aside, he began his career in that notorious year, 1984, as a chip designer at AMD. The company, whose abbreviation stands for “Advanced Micro Devices,” would for many years be closely tied to the great chip battle with Jensen's future “offspring,” the two sharing a tightly intertwined history worthy of a Taiwanese version of The Bold and the Beautiful.
His next workplace was LSI Corporation, where he led the development of modern chips. Meanwhile, he did not abandon his education—by 1992 he held a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.
Envy, Anyone?
The fairy tale of his success, as we have seen, begins a year later. “In 1993, I founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to solve the problem of 3D graphics for PCs,” Jensen writes modestly and laconically in his LinkedIn profile. “Our pioneering work in accelerated computing led to the reinvention of modern computer graphics and the creation of modern AI.”
Is that so? It is. Every powerful story can be told in two sentences, but in most cases it loses something in the process.
Today NVIDIA employs 32,000 people. “And we are looking for talented, driven, adventurous people ready to take on challenges no one else can solve. NVIDIA employees create technology that moves all of humanity forward and support the communities where they work and live.”
Jensen Huang and company certainly do not owe their success to chance. They owe it to professionalism and innovation, because over all three decades of computer development they have paved the way for the technologies that followed.
Both Micro and Soft
Software is a wonderful direction to grow in—ask Bill Gates. Programs also support a huge part of today's Bulgarian IT sector, which never stops being attractive and growing, even now that AI poses serious challenges to it. Over the past decades, hardware definitely stayed in software's shadow. Technology advanced, computers grew better and faster—you may remember the days when a few megabytes were the limit of what you could store. Then came cloud services, and hardware—the computers themselves with all their components—became an important but banal topic; the next solutions simply kept arriving.
And then came ChatGPT, and the world turned its gaze to artificial intelligence. Every new model keeps impressing with yet another big success, with the new capabilities it gives us (which I often show on this site). Suddenly it turned out that the “machine” itself was crucial once again. That hardware progress is undeniable, but there is one particular detail that matters enormously in the age of artificial intelligence. But what does AI have to do with a company created to do its best at displaying ever more perfect three-dimensional graphics, ever more realistic virtual reality…?
The processor is the heart of your computer. It processes data, distributes it, “runs” the code. With the rise of machine learning, which for a long time even scientists refused to call “artificial intelligence,” things changed. Graphics processors, chips whose role until then had been merely to display, moved to center stage. They are made mainly by two large companies, and they turned out to be an extremely valuable resource. It became clear that they have no rival when parallel computing is needed—which is exactly how today's machine learning algorithms work.
The Players' Game
No one could have foreseen anything of the kind back in '93, which in technological time is so very far away. Yes, computers had developed by then and had already made it into homes. But even the mass internet was still a distant illusion, and one of the undisputed uses of the time was games. A serious race was taking shape in the field of graphics processors, and NVIDIA joined it with a flying start. Jensen launched the venture with two friends, who gradually faded into the shadow of the media spotlight. The starting capital was a modest $40,000, but investors were found relatively quickly. Developing chips is certainly a more expensive undertaking than software; it cannot happen without serious money.
But it is also harder. The company's first chip was a failure. Then, in 1997, came the second—RIVA 128—and it became a market hit. Soon after, the GeForce 256 established Huang's firm as the leader in the industry.
The battle played out in a particularly interesting way. In 1996 more than 30 companies were racing to offer new graphics cards, while five years later only 2 had survived—NVIDIA and the Canadian ATI. A little later, the rival was sold to AMD, and so we arrive at 2018, when our hero's company held 3/4 of the graphics processor market against 1/4 for the other giant, with almost no one else on the market.
I mentioned the curious connection between the two mastodons of the field. A great battle, free competition! You may have heard the story of the two Dassler brothers, who created the sports giants Adidas and Puma. Well, a similar plot is unfolding in the era of advanced graphics chips. Since 2014, AMD has been led by Lisa Su, who is Jensen's niece.
Programs and More Programs!
NVIDIA went public in 1999. When its share price reached 100 dollars, Jensen had the company logo tattooed on his left shoulder. He says he will hardly ever get a second tattoo. If he has broken his promise, we have no way of knowing, since you will hardly ever see him at a public event without his signature leather jacket.
Pavel Durov's children number 106, Elon Musk's 14 (so far). Compared to them, Jensen is terribly boring. He met his wife, Lori Mills, while teaching her at university. They have a boy and a girl with the typically Taiwanese names Spencer and Madison. For a long time Spencer made his living from the bar he opened in his father's homeland. Then he decided he had had enough cocktails and started work as a product manager at NVIDIA. Madison ran a hotel for many years before she, too, joined the ranks of the family company.
Jensen and family give generously to charity and work with the foundations of Bill and Melinda Gates. The Huang family has set aside a whole billion dollars to support students in California.
He was absent from the inauguration of the new American president, unlike the familiar faces of the software world. He was even asked about it, and he said he had been busy traveling to celebrate the Lunar New Year with his colleagues. But, by all appearances, a great deal will yet depend on him and his company.
Papa Carlo
“I think there are three conditions for people to be able to do their life's work,” Jensen reveals his credo. “Give them access to information. I don't make decisions where only one person needs to hear them. I prefer an environment where a team of different experts can work on a problem. Reason through problems in public. It's incredibly empowering to take an abstract idea and argue it down to exactly what we should or shouldn't do. A complete company. I try to encourage the experts and contributors at every level of the company to work on a problem at the same time.”
He draws every eye each time he appears at a company event to unveil yet another revolutionary chip capable of far greater computing power. And then, unlike so many promises in Silicon Valley, it turns out that the promise is kept—the new generation of chips really can do everything our hero said it would.
So successful, and yet part of… the biggest “deflation” in stock market history? Yes, when the Chinese startup DeepSeek unveiled its revolutionary model, NVIDIA's shares collapsed at a remarkable pace. In a single day, Huang himself lost a virtual, but still rather remarkable, 20 billion dollars!
Still, this battle has only just begun. And whatever its future looks like, Jensen Huang will surely be an important part of it. That is why it is worth hearing a little more of his views on all the big themes of tomorrow.
Words Break No Bones
“The last 10 years have really been about the science of artificial intelligence,” says the founder of Nvidia. “Over the next 10 years we'll have a lot of AI science, but it will be focused on its application, the fundamental versus the applied. AI will become widespread and make its way into almost every industry.”
For better or worse, he seems to be right. His advice to future generations is simple: “Learn to use the technology in its various forms. If I were a student today, the first thing I would do is learn AI. Get used to interacting with ChatGPT, with Gemini Pro, with Grok. Learning to work with AI is no different from being really good at asking questions.”
“If I gave a computer to someone who had never seen anything like it, there's no way they'd learn to use it in a day. Whereas today you can simply type: ‘I don't know how to use ChatGPT, tell me,’ and it will come back with examples itself. The incredible thing about AI is that it will help you and make you superhuman along the way.”
Huang also says that in ten years “everything that moves will be robotic, every car will be robotic. Humanoid robots, the technology needed to make them happen, is very close, just around the corner.”
Huangis
“I think my work-life balance is excellent. I work from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed, seven days a week. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about work,” Jensen boasts. It doesn't sound very healthy.
They also call him “the Taylor Swift of tech.” How apt the comparison is I will ask Miss Swift's fans to tell me—I'll be delighted if some of them have read this far.
One of the company's recent conferences was held at the stadium in San Jose. Highly unusual and ambitious for the computer world. “I'm an engineer, I'm not a singer. When I walked out there…, everyone went crazy, it took my breath away. I was more scared than I've ever been. I'm still scared,” he says.
Mr. Huang's presentations are, as a rule, meaningful, polished and engaging. And, without fail, they feature his trademark—the leather jacket, which seems to have gone out of fashion so long ago. “Leather jackets can be a sign of an edge: a willingness to break the rules, to do things differently and to challenge the status quo,” says fashion stylist Serra Murphy. “Jensen's signature style gives him a relaxed, approachable energy.”
Definitely. The interesting, strong personalities are still out there—the ones who not only draw the future but also stir our hearts.
But where will this New Age biker from the Republic of China lead us on his motorcycle? The most interesting part is surely yet to come. In the world of technology, and in the world of interesting stories. Of the personalities who draw tomorrow. Safe travels, 生 Jensen!
