How a tech genius immigrant turned Nvidia into a $2TN business

Daily Mail​

5 hours ago

Back in 2010, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told an interviewer that the most fun part of any game or business venture is 'when you're losing.' It may then be safe to assume that Huang isn't having much fun right now. Nvidia, the computer chip designer spearheading the artificial intelligence revolution, saw its market capitalization top $2 trillion early Friday morning. Its technology - once used to create graphics for video games - is capable of training AI models to perform tasks like image, facial, and speech recognition as well as generating text for chatbots like ChatGPT.
Nvidia's unlikely success story from a niche tech firm to America's third biggest company has catapulted Huang to the 20th richest person on the planet with a net worth of $69.7 billion, Bloomberg estimates. It marks an astonishing reversal of fortune for a shy former Denny's worker who was bullied at his Kentucky school after arriving from Thailand when he was nine. But then everything about Huang's story is astonishing and showcases the powerful potential of when hard work, perseverance and good luck combine. Today, the 61-year-old father-of-two lives with his wife Lori on San Francisco's Billionaires' Row where homes cost tens of millions of dollars and you can count tech giants Larry Ellison and David Sachs as neighbors.
The 11,400-square-foot, seven-bedroom property boasts panoramic views of the city's Gold Coast and has an estimated worth of $44 million, according to Redfin. Property records show Huang also owns a home in Maui, Hawaii - with an estimated value of $33 million - while he sold a third place in Los Altos, California, for $9.9 million in 2022. As his wealth has ballooned, Huang too has transformed. Once a geeky, unassuming computer scientist, he is now a Silicon Valley rockstar - armed always in his trademark black leather jacket and with a tattoo of the Nvidia logo on his left arm.
His life now is a world's away from his childhood which was, by his own admission, steeped in adversity. Huang was born Jen-Hsun Huang in Taiwan in 1963 but spent the bulk of his early life in Thailand. His fortuitous move to the US came after his father, an employee of air conditioner manufacturer Carrier, visited the country for training and vowed to send his sons there, Huang previously told CNBC. In preparation, his mother would teach him English by reading ten words of the dictionary to him each day - despite not understanding a word of it herself. Aged nine, he and his older brother traveled to America unaccompanied to live with relatives.
His early life in the states was shaped by a somewhat bizarre series of events: Huang's aunt and uncle, from Tacoma, Washington, accidentally enrolled him and his brother at a Baptist boarding school in Kentucky - under the mistaken belief it was a prestigious prep school. While there, his long hair and accented English made him a target for bullies. In a recent profile with the New Yorker magazine, he calmly told an interviewer: 'The way you describe Chinese people back then was '[expletive].'
Still, he speaks highly of his time at Oneida Baptist Institute (he donated $2 million to build a new girls' dorm at the school) and credits it for instilling his 'fanatical' work ethic. His chores as a schoolboy included scrubbing all the toilets in his three-story dorm every day. While studying, he also displayed a near-prodigal talent for table tennis that led him to be described in a 1978 issue of Sports Illustrated as 'perhaps the most promising junior ever to play table tennis in the Northwest'. He went on to become a straight-A student in high school and developed his passion for computing while studying for a degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University.
Huang graduated as computers were breaking into the mainstream in 1984 - the same year Apple released its first Macintosh and the term 'cyberspace' was coined. It was also at Oregon that he met his wife, Lori - one of the few girls on his engineering course. Together, they have two adult children, Spencer and Madison. In a 2010 interview with the New York Times , Huang described himself as a 'very introverted' young man and 'incredibly shy' - something he was forced to overcome while washing dishes and waiting tables at Denny's aged 15. At the time, the US minimum wage was just $2.65 an hour.
He told the Times: 'I was horrified by the prospect of having to talk to people.' It was maybe a serendipitous turn of events then that his journey with Nvidia also began at Denny's diner in 1993. There, he ate a Super Bird sandwich with mayo and mustard while chatting to his two fellow co-founders about the potential for a company that specialized in computer chips to render graphics. Over 30 years - and a brief brush with bankruptcy - Huang steered Nvidia into a leader in manufacturing graphic processing units (GPUs) which were predominantly used for video games. But he realized the happy coincidence that GPUs had great potential for AI which requires significant processing power.
This gave Nvidia a head start in the market. One Wall Street analyst recently commented: 'There's a war going on out there in AI and Nvidia is the only Arms dealer.' It is now estimated to have more than 80 percent of the GPU market. The chips are worth tens of thousands of dollars each and have become so treasured they are reportedly delivered between some companies by armored car. Nvidia's significance in the AI revolution was first made clear following the hype around artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. News that ChatGPT had trained on a Nvidia supercomputer saw the latter's value balloon by around two hundred billion dollars on May 25, 2023.
It was one of the largest single-day gains in stock market history. Those familiar with the company are in no doubt its success is down to Huang's creative vision, lofty ambitions and work ethic. A true Silicon Valley eccentric, he is famed for writing hundreds of very short emails every day - something his staff has likened to 'haikus.' He has previously said he does not have his own office in the company's Santa Clara headquarters - instead opting to hot desk in different conference rooms each day. One told the New Yorker that interacting with him was like 'sticking your finger in the electric socket.'
Such is his commitment to the firm he co-founded more than 30 years ago he has joked of transforming himself into a robot so he can remain at its helm for many more decades. Nevertheless, his management style appears to have proven popular. The company has a 4.6 star rating (out of five) on workplace review site Glassdoor. Huang himself has a 97 percent approval rating as CEO. Explaining his attitude to business, he told the NYT more than a decade ago: 'Maybe it's because I grew up in the video game era, but I've never beaten myself up about mistakes. When I try something and it doesn't turn out, I go back and try it again.'