Jensen Huang

Huang emigrated from Taiwan as a child, studied electrical engineering at Oregon State and Stanford, and co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to build graphics chips for gaming. The company popularized the term GPU with the GeForce 256 in 1999.

His decisive bet was CUDA in 2006, which turned GPUs into general-purpose parallel computers years before deep learning made that capability priceless. When AlexNet was trained on NVIDIA hardware in 2012, the company’s trajectory changed; a decade later its data-center business dwarfed gaming as H100 and then Blackwell systems became the scarcest commodities in technology.

Huang runs NVIDIA on an annual architecture cadence with a full-stack strategy — chips, NVLink systems, networking, and the CUDA software moat — that competitors have struggled to match. NVIDIA became the first company to reach a $4 trillion market capitalization in 2025, and the prices it charges for compute ripple directly into the cost of every AI token generated worldwide.