Jensen Huang (黃仁勳)

30-second overview: In 1973, nine-year-old Jensen Huang was sent to a reform school in Kentucky, where he scrubbed toilets every day and shared a room with a seventeen-year-old covered in knife scars and tattoos. Fifty-two years later, the company he founded, NVIDIA, became the first company in human history to reach a market capitalization exceeding $5 trillion. His defining bet was not the GPU but CUDA — a platform launched in 2006 when everyone thought he was crazy, one that would only prove its value a decade later when the AI revolution arrived.

In the autumn of 1973, a nine-year-old Taiwanese boy who spoke no English and was small for his age walked through the doors of Oneida Baptist Institute in Clay County, Kentucky. Founded in 1899, the school was initially established to educate impoverished children from the Appalachian mountains and later also accepted youth in "difficult circumstances."¹ Jensen Huang's uncle and aunt had mistaken it for a prestigious private school, and his parents sold nearly everything they owned to pay the tuition.

He was the youngest boarding student in the school's history. His assigned roommate was "a seventeen-year-old covered in knife scars and tattoos."² There, Huang scrubbed the men's dormitory bathrooms every day after school and was frequently bullied. But he struck a deal with his roommate: he would teach the roommate to read, and the roommate would teach him to lift weights.

On October 29, 2025, NVIDIA's market capitalization surpassed $5 trillion, making it the most valuable company on Earth.³ Huang's personal net worth was approximately $165 billion, ranking him seventh in the world.⁴

Curator's note
Jensen Huang's story is more than an inspirational tale because his success was not linear. Between scrubbing toilets and betting on CUDA, he nearly allowed NVIDIA to go bankrupt at least three times. This is not a story of "work hard and you will succeed" — it is a story of persisting through the moment when everyone believes you are crazy, until the time catches up with you.

Tainan, Bangkok, Kentucky: A Misplaced Childhood

Jensen Huang was born in 1963 in Taipei and grew up in Tainan. His father, Huang Hsing-tai, was a chemical engineer at an oil refinery; his mother, Luo Tsai-hsiu, was a teacher. This was a Taiwanese-speaking middle-class family in which the mother randomly selected ten English vocabulary words from the dictionary each day to teach her two sons. At age five, the whole family relocated to Thailand for his father's work, and Huang attended Ruamrudee International School in Bangkok.

In 1973, Thailand erupted in large-scale political unrest. Huang's parents decided to send their two sons to the United States, to the care of an uncle and aunt who had recently immigrated to Tacoma, Washington. The uncle and aunt enrolled the brothers at Oneida Baptist Institute. In 2019, the successful Huang donated $2 million to the school to build a girls' dormitory and classroom building named after him.⁵

Did you know?
At age fourteen, Jensen Huang appeared in Sports Illustrated as a table tennis player.² At that reform school, he joined the swim team and learned to play table tennis — using athletics to find a way to survive.

Two years later, his parents finally immigrated to Beaverton, Oregon, and the brothers were able to leave Kentucky. Huang enrolled at Aloha High School, skipped two grades, and graduated at sixteen. In 2002, he reflected on that period: "My memories of Kentucky are more vivid than any other period of my life."

The Boy Who Washed Dishes at Denny's — and Founded His Company There

Starting at age fifteen, Huang worked at a Denny's restaurant in Oregon, washing dishes, bussing tables, and waiting on customers, working the late shift for five years (1978–1983). He later said this job helped him overcome shyness. After graduating high school, he chose Oregon State University for its affordability, majoring in electrical engineering, and graduated with highest honors in 1984. He was the youngest in his class and "looked like a kid."

After a few years as a chip designer in Silicon Valley — first at AMD, then at LSI Logic — he met Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem through the Sun Microsystems project at LSI. The GX graphics accelerator they designed together was a major success, boosting Sun's revenues from $262 million in 1987 to $656 million in 1990.

In 1992, the three began meeting secretly at a Denny's diner in east San Jose to draw up their business plan. Huang chose Denny's because it was "quieter than home and the coffee was cheap." On April 5, 1993, they formally incorporated NVIDIA.⁶ The company name derives from the Latin invidia (envy), because Priem wanted competitors to "turn green with envy." Startup capital? $200 each — $600 total.

✦ "Jensen Huang washed dishes at Denny's at fifteen and founded what would become the world's most valuable company at thirty at Denny's."

Thirty Days from Bankruptcy

NVIDIA's first few years were not a success story — they were a near-death story.

The three founders later admitted they "had absolutely no idea how to run a company."⁷ Huang botched his pitch to legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Don Valentine, but Sequoia Capital invested anyway on the strength of LSI Logic CEO Wilfred Corrigan's endorsement.

NVIDIA initially chose quadrilateral rendering rather than the industry-standard triangle for its graphics work — a nearly fatal technical direction. When the company was on the verge of collapse, Japanese gaming giant SEGA invested $5 million to keep it alive, giving them time to pivot. When the RIVA 128 graphics card launched in August 1997, the company had only one month's payroll left in the bank.

From then on, "we're thirty days from going out of business" became NVIDIA's unofficial motto. Huang opened many internal presentations in subsequent years with this line.

Inventing a Word in 1999, Betting on the Decade Ahead in 2006

In 1999, NVIDIA launched the GeForce 256. Huang coined a new name for it: GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). This acronym permanently changed the industry's vocabulary. NVIDIA went public the same year.

But the decision that changed everything came in 2006.

Huang launched CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a platform enabling GPUs to perform not just graphics rendering but general-purpose scientific computation. Wall Street was not buying it; R&D costs surged while the stock price fell. Almost every analyst believed it was a waste of money: who needed a graphics card to do math?

Curator's note
The CUDA story is the central narrative tension of Jensen Huang and NVIDIA. He made a bet in 2006 that would only begin to be validated around 2012: deep learning requires massive amounts of matrix computation, and the parallel architecture of GPUs is perfectly suited to it. This was not foresight — it was a man who did the right thing at the wrong time, holding on until time caught up with him.

Around 2012, deep learning suddenly erupted in academia. Researchers discovered that the most efficient hardware for training neural networks was NVIDIA's GPUs running CUDA. From that point, NVIDIA was no longer "just a graphics card company" but the heart of global AI computing. From ChatGPT to autonomous vehicles, the engine behind almost all of it is NVIDIA.

"Jensanity" and Taiwan's Silicon Shield

In June 2024, Jensen Huang appeared at Computex in Taipei. He was not on the official speaker list, yet the entire city of Taipei went into a frenzy. Crowds of fans and paparazzi followed his every public appearance; Taiwanese media called it "仁來瘋" (Jensanity), an echo of "Linsanity" from Jeremy Lin in 2012.

He wore his signature black leather jacket to eat street food at night markets, chatted with vendors in Taiwanese Hokkien (台語), and posed for photos with passersby. Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of the two of them in each other's signature jackets on Instagram, writing "he's like the Taylor Swift of tech."⁸

But Huang's significance to Taiwan goes far beyond celebrity. NVIDIA's most advanced chips are manufactured by TSMC, and Huang and Morris Chang go back more than thirty years. At his Computex talk, he displayed a map of Taiwan dotted with NVIDIA's Taiwanese supply chain partners, and declared "Taiwan is a world hero."

This was not flattery. NVIDIA's AI chips require TSMC's most advanced processes; TSMC needs NVIDIA's orders to fill its cutting-edge production lines. The fates of the two companies are bound together — and this bond runs through an island that averages 3.7 earthquakes per year and is regularly swept by typhoons.

In January 2026, Huang returned to Taiwan to sign a land-use agreement for NVIDIA's new Taiwan headquarters at the Beitou-Shilin Technology Park in Taipei. He said: "We're hiring a lot of people in Taiwan."⁹ He returns to Taiwan almost every quarter, always immersed in Tainan street food stalls and semiconductor supply chains.

One Family, Two Chip Empires

Jensen Huang has a family connection that is rarely mentioned: AMD CEO Lisa Su is his relative. More precisely, Lisa Su's maternal grandfather is the elder brother of Huang's mother, making Huang Su's first cousin once removed.¹⁰ The two separately lead the world's two largest GPU companies, and both companies' chips are manufactured by the same Taiwanese company — TSMC.

Two people who left Taiwan for America built the world's two most important AI chip companies, then sent the most critical manufacturing step back to the island where they were born. Su herself has described the relationship as "some very complicated kind of distant cousin"; the two had never met before she went to work at IBM.

The CEO Who Wears No Watch

Jensen Huang's management style is unlike that of a typical Silicon Valley CEO. He has no fixed office, moving among meeting rooms throughout the NVIDIA campus. He has approximately sixty direct reports — at most companies, this number is six to eight. His logic: "The people who report directly to me should be top performers who don't need to be coddled."

He wears no watch. When asked why, he says: "Because right now is the most important moment."¹¹

He is also candid about the fact that NVIDIA's success was bought through pain. He has said: "If we had known from the beginning how much pain, shame, and failure we would endure... we probably wouldn't have done it." But he simultaneously believes it was precisely those years on the brink of bankruptcy that forced him to become a better leader.

Curtis Priem recalled: "We listened to Jensen from day one. We told him, you run the company — everything Chris and I don't know how to do."⁷ Huang was thirty at the time — younger than the other two founders.

The Toilet-Scrubber with an NVIDIA Tattoo

In 2024, Huang received an honorary doctorate from National Taiwan University, was named best CEO of the year by The Economist, and appeared on Time's 100 Most Influential People list. In 2025, he and NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally were jointly awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering — alongside AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Fei-Fei Li — presented in person by King Charles III at St. James's Palace.¹²

But beyond all these titles, one detail perhaps says more about the kind of person he is. When NVIDIA's market cap broke $1 trillion, he fulfilled a promise he had made to his employees by tattooing NVIDIA's logo on his arm.

Jensen Huang now has a corporate logo tattooed on his arm. The roommate covered in tattoos at that reform school, when Huang was ten, taught him to lift weights; Huang taught the roommate to read. That deal, fifty years later, was probably the highest-ROI transaction of his life.

Further Reading

• Morris Chang — NVIDIA's most crucial partner, founder of TSMC, whose thirty-year friendship with Huang anchors the global AI supply chain
• TSMC — the Taiwanese company that manufactures NVIDIA's most advanced chips; the "world hero" in Huang's words
• Taiwan's Semiconductor Industry — both Huang's and Lisa Su's chips are made on this island; this is Taiwan's silicon shield

References