Nvidia has emerged as one of the main winners of the AI investing craze — and the good times keep rolling for the semiconductor giant.
One obvious winner anytime the year’s hottest stock surges is Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang. His net worth jumped by $75 billion over the past year, according to data from Bloomberg, as investors seized on better-than-expected quarterly profit and revenue numbers.
Huang’s personal fortune of $119 billion now puts him 12th on the outlet’s Billionaires Index. He’s richer than every Walmart heir, including founder Sam Walton’s three children Rob, Jim, and Alice.
Here’s everything you need to know about Huang, who rocks a leather jacket everywhere he goes and reportedly got a tattoo of Nvidia’s logo once the company’s share price hit $100.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is now worth $119 billion.
Most of Huang’s wealth comes from his 3.5% stake in the Santa Clara-based chipmaker, according to the company’s 2023 annual report.
The jump in Nvidia stock follows another set of blockbuster quarterly earnings this week as the generative AI boom continues.
Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.35 trillion, according to Reuters. The company reached the $3 trillion milestone three decades after its launch in 1993, surpassing Apple, which took nearly five decades to achieve the same valuation.
He moved to the US as a child.
Born as Jen-hsun Huang in Taipei in 1963, Huang spent part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand, per Bloomberg.
In 1973, Huang’s parents sent their children to relatives in the US owing to the social unrest in the Southeast Asian country, before relocating there themselves.
Huang’s aunt and uncle — who were recent migrants to Washington state at the time — accidentally sent Jensen and his brother to Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, which was considered a reform school instead of a prep school, according to Huang’s 2002 interview with Wired.
“And the kids were really tough,” Huang told NPR in a 2012 interview. “They all had pocket knives — and when they get in fights, it’s not pretty. Kids get hurt.”
Students at the school also had to work, and Huang’s duty was to clean the bathrooms.
“The ending of the story is I loved the time I was there,” Huang told NPR. “We worked really hard — we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough.”
In 2019, he and his wife Lori donated $2 million toward building a female dormitory and classroom building at the school, per the institute’s website.
He loves computer games and studied electrical engineering.
Huang and his brother eventually moved to Oregon where they rejoined the family.
During his time as a high schooler in Beaverton, he was a nationally ranked junior table tennis champion, according to a 2017 profile on Oregon State University, or OSU, where Huang attended college.
Huang also holds a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.
Huang met his wife, Lori Mills, in his freshman year of college.
The couple have two children, according to OSU’s profile.
“I enjoyed computers growing up, but OSU opened up my eyes to the magic behind them,” he told the university.
Huang graduated in 1984 — the “perfect year to graduate,” he said at a keynote speech at National Taiwan University’s commencement ceremony this year, per Fortune. That was the same year when the first Mac computers were released, bringing forth a new age in personal computing.
After graduating from OSU, Huang worked at chip companies LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices in a variety of roles, according to his bio on Nvidia’s website.
He founded Nvidia in 1993 after leaving LSI Logic.
Huang founded Nvidia while dining at Denny’s.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 at a Denny’s restaurant where he was meeting with two friends, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, per The Wall Street Journal.
The trio “wondered whether starting a graphics company would be a good idea,” Huang told Stanford University’s engineering school in a 2010 interview.
“We brainstormed and fantasized about what kind of company it would be and the world we could help. It was fun,” he told Stanford.
Denny’s was also where Huang part-timed when he was a student, per a 2010 New York Times interview. There, he learned how to be more outgoing.
“I was a very good student and I was always focused and driven. But I was very introverted. I was incredibly shy,” he told The Times. “The one experience that pulled me out of my shell was waiting tables at Denny’s. I was horrified by the prospect of having to talk to people.”
Huang is 61, making him years older than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos when they left day-to-day operations at 52 and 57 years old, respectively.
There are few signs he plans to slow down.
“Nothing is more fun to me than to build a once-in-a-generation company with all of my friends here,” Huang told Business Insider in 2021 . “I can’t imagine wanting to do anything other than that.”
May 24, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect movements in Nvdia’s share price and Jensen Huang’s net worth.
Huang is now one of the biggest winners of the AI boom.
Nvidia has made itself a key player in the AI boom by supplying hardware to major companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Demand for the company’s hardware has been driven by several factors, including a sophisticated software system that makes its chips simple to use as well as a shortage of AI chips.
Huang now believes we’ve hit a new threshold in the AI hype cycle. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries, and nations,” Huang said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings press release.
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