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Jensen Huang
Creating the software to enable a virtual world
AI is transforming our world. The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang.
Jensen Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993, building more powerful computer chips for video games.
The 56 year old Taiwanese American entrepreneur, worth $4.6bn, is now leading the AI revolution, and has just been ranked as “The World’s Best Performing CEO” of 2019 according to Harvard Business Review.
Huang, actually named Jen-Hsun rather than Jensen, graduated from Oregon State University and then gained a masters in electrical engineering from Stanford.
His strategy when founding the tech business was to focus on a single niche: building powerful computer chips to create graphics for fast-moving video games. As the company went public in 1999 and grew through the 2000s, video games remained its growth engine, but even back then Huang could see a different path forward.
Data scientists were beginning to ask computers to perform much more sophisticated calculations more quickly, so Nvidia began spending billions of dollars on R&D to create chips that would support artificial intelligence applications. By the mid-2010s its AI-focused chips had come to dominate this nascent market, showing up inside autonomous vehicles, robots, drone aircraft, and dozens of other high-tech tools.
Nvidia’s stock market performance shows how this bet has paid off: From late 2015 to late 2018, the company’s stock grew 14-fold—a performance that puts Huang at the top of HBR’s list of best-performing CEOs in the world this year. Huang was previously ranked #2 in 2018 and #3 in 2017.
In 2021 Time Magazine made Huang one of its 100 people of the year, saying “Huang’s gamble paid off largely because he is among the world’s most technically savvy CEOs. He’s also a compassionate steward of his employees and a generous supporter of education in science and technology. With still emerging AI technologies creating an insatiable hunger for more computation, Huang’s team is well-positioned to keep driving technological advances for decades to come.”
FastLeader, January 2020