Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang was born in Tainan, Taiwan. In his early childhood his family moved between Taiwan and Thailand, and around the age of nine he and his brother were sent to live with relatives in the United States. At a rough boarding school in Kentucky he learned independence and endurance far too early, and grew up carrying the insecurity of an immigrant boy — that ever-present sense of "you could fall at any moment" later crystallized into the line he loves to repeat: we are always thirty days from going out of business.

He was not a prodigy who came out of nowhere, but an engineer who worked his way up from the bottom. After earning an electrical engineering degree at Oregon State University, he did chip design and management at AMD and LSI Logic, gradually mastering both the technology and the relationships of the semiconductor industry. It was not until he turned thirty that he and two partners decided to found NVIDIA, betting on the then-niche field of PC graphics acceleration.

The road nearly ended in death almost from the start. The first product bet was wrong, and the company came within a hair of collapse; it was a later graphics chip that pulled it back from the edge. What truly set him apart was his conviction in the very idea of the GPU, and his willingness — when everyone else saw graphics cards as mere gaming accessories — to bet on a longer road: launching CUDA to turn graphics chips into engines of general-purpose computing. For years this move was misunderstood and the financials looked poor, but he held the line.

The turning point arrived quietly with the explosion of deep learning. When researchers discovered that NVIDIA's chips were exactly the right tool for training neural networks, the long-neglected bet suddenly became the main channel. The wave of generative AI pushed the hunger for compute to its extreme, and NVIDIA leapt from a graphics-card company to the "seller of shovels" for the entire AI era, its market value climbing to the very top in the world.

Looking back at Jensen Huang, his weight lies not in any single blockbuster product but in a rare long-termism: he kept investing for more than a decade in a direction no one believed in, until the era finally came to him. Behind that signature black leather jacket is a man who always carries a sense of crisis, living each day as if only thirty remain. He redefined the shape of computing and became one of the names most impossible to bypass in this round of the technological revolution.