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Jensen Huang

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Jensen Huang
黃仁勳
Huang in 2023
Born
Huang Jen-hsun

(1963-02-17) February 17, 1963 (age 61)
Taipei, Taiwan
Citizenship
  • United States
  • Taiwan
Alma mater
Occupations
  • Businessman
  • electrical engineer
  • philanthropist
Known forCo-founding Nvidia
TitlePresident and CEO of Nvidia Corporation
SpouseLori Huang
Children2[1]
RelativesLisa Su (cousin)
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese黃仁勳
Simplified Chinese黄仁勋
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinHuáng Rénxūn
Bopomofoㄏㄨㄤˊ ㄖㄣˊㄒㄩㄣ
Gwoyeu RomatzyhHwang Renshiun
Wade–GilesHuang2 Jen2-hsün1
IPA[xwǎŋ ɻə̌n.ɕýn]
Yue: Cantonese
JyutpingWong4 Jan4-fan1
Southern Min
Hokkien POJN̂g Jîn-hun
Tâi-lôN̂g Jîn-hun
Websitenvidia.com
Signature

Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang[a] (Chinese: 黃仁勳; pinyin: Huáng Rénxūn; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂g Jîn-hun; born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese and American businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the founder, president, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nvidia, the world's largest semiconductor company.[3] As of December 2024, Forbes estimated Huang's net worth at $118.2 billion, making him the 10th richest person in the world.[4]

The son of Taiwanese American immigrants, Huang moved from Taiwan to the US in his childhood. After receiving a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he co-founded Nvidia in 1993 at the age of 30. In June 2024, Nvidia became the largest company in the world by market capitalization.[5]

Early life and education

[edit]

Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1963,[3] and moved to the southern city of Tainan as a child.[6] He is the son of Huang Hsing-tai, a chemical engineer at an oil refinery, and Lo Tsai-hsiu, a schoolteacher.[7] When he was five years old, Huang's family moved to Thailand to support his father's refinery work and remained there for approximately four years.[8][6] He attended Ruamrudee International School while in Bangkok.[9]

At age nine, Huang, despite not being able to speak English, was sent by his parents to live in the United States.[10] He and his older brother moved in 1973 to reside with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, due to widespread social unrest in Thailand.[11] Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled he and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky,[11] mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school.[12]

When he was ten years old, Huang lived with his brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory. Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English" and was frequently bullied.[12] In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets everyday, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team,[13] and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14.[14] He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars,"[14] how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press.[12] In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".[14]

Two years after Huang arrived in Oneida, his parents moved to the United States and settled in Oregon, where the brothers moved back to live with them.[12] As a teenager, Huang attended Aloha High School in Aloha, Oregon,[15] where he excelled academically. He skipped two grades, graduated at age sixteen, and became a nationally ranked table-tennis player in addition to being a member of its mathematics, computer, and science clubs.[12] While growing up in Oregon in the late 1970s and early 1980s,[16] Huang worked the graveyard shift at a local Denny's restaurant as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter.[17][18]

After high school, Huang studied electrical engineering and computer science at Oregon State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1984.[19] Years later, while working as a microchip designer in Silicon Valley, he simultaneously pursued graduate night classes at Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1992.[12][20]

Career

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Huang meeting with Narendra Modi in 2023

After graduating from university, Huang was the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and as microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).[21] In 1993, aged 30, he co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and became its CEO and president.[12][22] The three men founded the company in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner in East San Jose.[12][23][24] He personally signed Nvidia's original articles of incorporation on April 5, 1993.[2]

As of 2024, Huang has been Nvidia's chief executive for over three decades, a tenure described by The Wall Street Journal as "almost unheard of in fast-moving Silicon Valley".[25] He owns 3.6% of Nvidia's stock, which went public in 1999.[4] He earned US$24.6 million as CEO in 2007, ranking him as the 61st highest paid U.S. CEO by Forbes.[4]

According to Huang, the three co-founders in 1993 had "no idea how" to start a company,[24] "building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder" than they expected, and they probably would not have done it if they had realized up front "the pain and suffering [involved] ... the challenges [they were] going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that [would] go wrong."[26] For its first graphics accelerator chips, Nvidia focused on rendering quadrilateral primitives (forward texture mapping) instead of the triangle primitives preferred by its competitors,[12] and barely survived long enough to successfully pivot to triangles only because Sega agreed to keep Nvidia alive with a $5 million investment.[27] By the time the RIVA 128 was released in August 1997 and saved the company, Nvidia was down to one month of payroll.[12] This resulted in the "unofficial company motto": "Our company is thirty days from going out of business."[12] Huang regularly began presentations to Nvidia staff with those words for many years.[12] However, Huang regards the "pain and suffering" of Nvidia's early years as essential to the company's success in later years, because it forced him to become a better leader.[28]

Huang does not keep a fixed office; he roams Nvidia's headquarters and settles temporarily in conference rooms as needed.[29] He prefers to maintain a relatively flat management structure, with around 60 direct reports as of November 2024,[30] on the ground that people reporting directly to him "should be at the top of their game" and "require the least amount of pampering".[31] He does not wear a watch, because as he likes to say, "now is the most important time".[25]

Historically, Huang and Nvidia were well-known only among the gamers and computer graphics experts who were the original intended markets for Nvidia's graphics processing unit (GPU) products. In 2017, a Fortune profile article acknowledged: "If you haven’t heard of Nvidia, you can be forgiven."[29] During the AI boom, Huang's net worth rose rapidly along with the value of Nvidia's stock, from US$3 billion in 2019 to US$90 billion in May 2024.[32] During this same timeframe, Huang became more widely known. In March 2024, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram with a picture of himself and Huang wearing each other's signature jacket: "He's like Taylor Swift, but for tech".[33]

In June 2024, Nvidia's market capitalization reached US$3 trillion for the first time and Huang's net worth grew to US$100 billion.[34] By then, the news media was using the term "Jensanity" to refer to Huang's celebrity status in Taiwan,[34] and it was compared to the "Linsanity" phenomenon of 2012.[8] Huang was the center of attention at Computex 2024 in Taipei, even though he was not on the official speaking program.[34] Large crowds of fans and paparazzi followed Huang and his family members around every time they appeared in public during their 2024 visit to Taiwan.[34][8]

Philanthropy

[edit]

In 2008, Nvidia contributed funds to establish a classroom at the Beijing Haidian Foreign Language Shi Yan School to cater to 101 elementary and middle school students from regions affected by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China. As a gesture of appreciation for the donation, the students ceremoniously bestowed a red scarf upon Huang, symbolizing their gratitude towards him. In return, Huang gifted kaleidoscopes to the students as a gesture of appreciation during the donation ceremony.[35] In addition, Huang also provided a donation of US$30 million to his former university, Stanford University, in order to establish the Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center.[36] The building is the second of four that make up Stanford's Science and Engineering Quad.[37]

In 2019, Huang donated $2 million to his former school, Oneida Baptist Institute, for the construction of Huang Hall, a modern facility that serves as a dormitory and classroom building for female students.[38]

In 2022, Huang gifted US$50 million to his alma mater, Oregon State University, as part of a larger US$200 million philanthropic contribution to establish a cutting-edge supercomputing institute on the university campus.[39]

Awards

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Jensen Huang at SC18
Jensen Huang in Taipei

Personal life

[edit]

While at Oregon State University, Huang met his future wife, Lori Mills, who was his engineering lab partner at the time.[12] They have two children, Spencer Huang (Chinese: 黃勝斌; pinyin: Huáng Shèngbīn) and Madison Huang (Chinese: 黃敏珊; pinyin: Huáng Mǐnshān).[29] Spencer launched a bar in Taipei in 2015 that was honored as one of the top 50 bars in Asia by Forbes. The bar closed in May 2021, and he is currently a product manager at Nvidia. Madison previously worked in the hotel industry and is currently director of product marketing at Nvidia.[1]

The Huang family lived in ordinary middle-class starter homes in San Jose before Nvidia went public in 1999.[63] In 2003, they moved to a larger house in Los Altos Hills, California, and in 2004 they acquired a second home in Wailea, Hawaii.[63] In 2017, a limited liability company reportedly linked to the Huangs acquired a mansion in San Francisco for $38 million.[63]

Huang and AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su are relatives.[64] His mother is the youngest sister of Su's maternal grandfather, making them first cousins, once removed.[65][66] Huang also speaks Taiwanese Hokkien,[67] and has dual Taiwanese and American citizenship.[68] He makes frequent visits back to Taiwan.[69]

Huang and Charles Liang, co-founder of Supermicro, are longtime friends. Both companies were established in 1993 and have collaborated on products, with the latter utilizing Nvidia AI chips in its servers.[70]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ Huang consistently capitalizes the second syllable of his given name in legal documents. For example, on April 5, 1993, he signed Nvidia's original articles of incorporation as Jen-Hsun Huang.[2]

References

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  1. ^ a b "多圖|黃仁勳混血帥兒曝光!結束台北酒吧 進NVIDIA幫老爸做這事|壹蘋新聞網". Nextapple (in Chinese (Taiwan)). May 31, 2023. Archived from the original on October 3, 2023. Retrieved June 10, 2023.
  2. ^ a b Huang, Jen-Hsun (April 5, 1993). "Articles of Incorporation of NVidia Corporation". bizfile online. California Secretary of State. Retrieved October 11, 2024.
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  7. ^ Volle, Adam (December 2024). "Jensen Huang: Taiwan-born American entrepreneur". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved December 15, 2024.
  8. ^ a b c Lin, Liza; Wang, Joyu; Jie, Yang (June 8, 2024). "Nvidia's Jensen Huang Finds Celebrity Status". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 8, 2024.
  9. ^ ไทยคู่ฟ้า ทําเนียบรัฐบาล (December 2, 2024). Mr. Jensen Huang ประธานกรรมการบริหารและผู้ก่อตั้งบริษัท NVIDIA เข้าพบนายกรัฐมนตรี. Retrieved December 4, 2024 – via YouTube. (At 0:27.) This is a video released by the Government of Thailand of a conversation between Huang and Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the current Prime Minister of Thailand, in which Huang mentions that he was raised in Bangkok and attended the Ruamrudee school.
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  70. ^ "Super Micro's shares up 3454% in the past 5 years".
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