Before Jensen Huang and Nvidia changed the technology landscape, the semiconductor business was conspicuously short of stars. Wealth, infidelity and politics seldom figured in discussions of the chip industry’s leaders.
But Mr. Huang changed Silicon Valley, starting in the middle of the past decade, by single-mindedly pursuing the silicon chips that power generative artificial intelligence and related innovations. Extraordinary riches followed for the Taiwan-born executive and many of his peers, in some cases eclipsing the fortunes of high-profile software or internet entrepreneurs.
With that money and influence came attention from powerful people in Washington, notably President Trump, and opportunities for the kinds of entanglements that Mr. Huang on Sunday admitted to with a Chinese executive who goes by Alice Huang. U.S. intelligence has determined that Ms. Huang, who could not be reached for comment, was a Chinese spy. A Nvidia spokeswoman declined to comment.
“Before generative A.I., semiconductors were not a sexy business, and were never a place for C.E.O.s to make fast money,” said David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who has closely tracked the chip business.
Mr. Huang largely seemed to fit this mold until 2023, Mr. Yoffie said, when generative intelligence driven by Nvidia chips exploded and turned the semiconductors — which can perform calculations and other tasks — into essential components.
“In the last three years, he became a rock star, which apparently attracted the same kind of attention as all rock stars,” Mr. Yoffie said.
Not that Mr. Huang, 63, is known for throwing his money around wildly by Silicon Valley standards, where fancy houses and fast cars are commonplace. But he could afford to splurge.
The value of his Nvidia stock holdings skyrocketed from about $659 million in 2017 — when the company was best known for chips called graphics processing units that were used in video games — to about $143 billion, factoring in a decline in the shares Monday following the news.
The most famous chip leader before Mr. Huang — Andy Grove, the former chief executive of Intel — never held shares worth more than a few hundred million dollars. Among the chip industry’s pioneers, Gordon Moore, who co-founded Intel, was the one prominent billionaire. Mr. Grove and Mr. Moore, as well as many of their peers, were known for long marriages and sedate lifestyles.
But Intel never experienced such a rapid surge in revenue or stock-market value as Nvidia, which makes chips that carry out the bulk of number-crunching in popular A.I. applications. The Silicon Valley company, which was founded in 1993 and in 2017 eclipsed $100 billion in value, became the first $1 trillion chip maker in 2023 and later the first public company to break $5 trillion.
A few other chip companies also saw their fortunes soar. One is Broadcom, which sells networking chips needed for A.I. data centers and helps companies design chips for A.I. calculations. Henry Samueli, one of its co-founders, holds shares worth about $26 billion.
Other big winners are suppliers of memory chips, which store vast amounts of data needed for A.I. calculations. Micron Technology, the sole U.S. maker of both kinds of chips, has been transformed from a frequent money-loser into a $1 trillion company before a recent market sell-off.
But Sanjay Mehotra, its chief executive, does not hold founder-size equity in the company. Neither does Hock Tan, Broadcom’s chief. Both hold shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to public findings.
The chip industry has not been immune from scandals. In 2018, Intel forced out its chief executive, Brian Krzanich, over a relationship with a subordinate.
And there have been some chip executives who liked to show off their wealth. Jerry Sanders, the co-founder and former chief of Advanced Micro Devices, bought flashy houses in Beverly Hills and Malibu and at times was driven around in Rolls-Royces.
Mr. Moore, who died in 2023, built a 10,000-square-foot home on the big island of Hawaii toward the end of his life. But he is much better known for his philanthropy and an oft-quoted prediction about the pace of improvements in manufacturing semiconductors. He never bought a Hawaiian island, unlike Larry Ellison, co-founder of the software giant Oracle.
Signs of exorbitant spending by semiconductor executives may become less likely now, partly because of a recent stock-market slump over fears that spending on A.I. data center hardware will slow.
Still, chip makers are reporting robust income statements and enjoying a sales surge that executives and analysts expect to last longer than past cycles. The industry’s annual sales surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in August, a figure that until recently was expected to be reached in 2030. That month, Gartner, a market research firm, predicted $1.6 trillion in revenue for 2026, up 92 percent from 2025.
“I have not seen this kind of growth,” said Ajit Monocha, the chief executive of the trade group SEMI, in kicking off its annual conference in San Francisco last month. “It’s the most exciting time of the industry.”
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