Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang (b. 1963) is a Taiwanese-American businessman and electrical engineer who co-founded the technology company Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its president and chief executive officer since its inception.^[1] Under his leadership, Nvidia pioneered the graphics processing unit (GPU) and grew into one of the world's most valuable companies, becoming central to the modern boom in artificial intelligence.

Early life and education

Jensen Huang was born on 17 February 1963 in Tainan, Taiwan.^[1] As a child he moved with his family to the United States, and he spent part of his youth at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky before the family settled in Oregon, where he attended Aloha High School.^[2]

He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984 and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992.^[1] Early in his career he worked as a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and as an engineer and manager at LSI Logic.

Founding of Nvidia

In 1993 Huang co-founded Nvidia with fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, betting that graphics-focused accelerated computing would grow into a market far larger than personal-computer video games.^[1] The company released the GeForce 256 in 1999, which it marketed as the first graphics processing unit, or GPU.

GPUs and the AI revolution

A pivotal decision came in 2006 with the introduction of CUDA, a software platform that let programmers harness Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose computation. CUDA made the company's chips well suited to the parallel mathematics behind deep learning, and Nvidia hardware became a dominant platform for training and running artificial-intelligence models.^[2] The surge in demand for AI computing helped Nvidia grow into one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.^[3]

Leadership and recognition

Huang is known for a hands-on management style and for his signature black leather jacket, and he is one of the longest-serving chief executives in the technology industry.^[1] In 2021 he was among the engineers awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, and he has received the IEEE Founders Medal and been named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people.^[4] His stewardship of Nvidia's transformation from a graphics-chip maker into a foundational supplier of AI infrastructure has made him one of the most closely watched figures in the technology sector.