Jensen Huang wasn\u2019t always in his trademark leather jacket. When the multibillionaire, now former Nvidia chief executive was a teenager in the US, his first job was waiting tables and washing dishes at a branch of Denny\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt teaches you humility, it teaches you hard work, it teaches you hospitality,\u201d he said in 2023<\/a> of his time at the diner chain.<\/p>\n Decades later, having become one of the richest people on the planet, Huang put on a Denny\u2019s apron in tribute to his former employer<\/a> at an Nvidia event in 2025.<\/p>\n By this point Huang had become a rockstar of the artificial intelligence boom \u2013 befitting his signature item of clothing \u2013 feted around the world by investors, fellow tech executives and politicians.<\/p>\n The company that Huang co-founded makes the computer chips that are integral to the development and operation of AI systems such as ChatGPT.<\/p>\n Demand for Nvidia\u2019s products has surged as hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into a technology that, according to its many promotors, will transform the global economy. The crude analogy is that Huang and Nvidia<\/a> have become the main purveyors of shovels in the AI gold rush.<\/p>\n In technical jargon, its AI chips are known as graphics processor units (GPUs), which were originally designed to handle the graphics for video games. But it turned out that a GPU\u2019s ability to carry out masses of technical calculations simultaneously and quickly is very handy for developing and operating AI systems, which have a voracious appetite for data crunching.<\/p>\n Jensen Huang makes a keynote speech at Computex in Taipei in May last year. Photograph: Ann Wang\/Reuters<\/p>\n Nvidia is also very good at creating networks of its chips, which produces the computing power artificial intelligence needs, and provides the CUDA software that helps the company\u2019s GPUs perform so well for AI customers.<\/p>\n Jen-Hsun Huang, 63, was born in Taiwan to a chemical engineer father and a schoolteacher mother. Decades later, the island would become the centre of chip manufacturing and the foundry for Nvidia\u2019s highly advanced chips.<\/p>\n But his life was largely lived outside Taiwan. After a spell living in Thailand, Huang moved to the US when he was 10 \u2013 he is a joint citizen of Taiwan and the US \u2013 and has said he is \u201calways an immigrant\u201d.<\/p>\n Accidentally enrolled by his uncle into a juvenile reform school in Kentucky, he anglicised his name and showed educational flair. Huang went to high school in Oregon and in 1984 he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, where he met his future wife, Lori, with whom he had a son and a daughter, both now Nvidia employees.<\/p>\n Jensen and Lori Huang arrive for a state dinner held for the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and his wife, Peng Liyuan, in Washington in September. Photograph: Aaron Schwartz\/Reuters<\/p>\n He then completed a master\u2019s degree in the same subject at Stanford University \u2013 in the heart of Silicon Valley \u2013 in 1992. A year later he founded Nvidia with fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, during a meeting in a booth at Denny\u2019s. The name is a riff on the Latin term for envy, invidia, an emotion that the company wanted its rivals to feel.<\/p>\n Huang\u2019s technical expertise also gave him an edge with customers and investors, according to The Nvidia Way, a biography of the company and its co-founder by Tae Kim.<\/p>\n The book quotes Tench Coxe, an Nvidia board member and early investor, who said Huang stood out.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you meet Jensen Huang, even with dozens of other graphics companies, you realise this is a guy you want to do business with,\u201d said Tench. \u201cWhat made him great is he is an engineer and he is a computer scientist.\u201d<\/p>\n Nvidia started out making graphics chips for personal computers. It released what is widely regarded as the world\u2019s first GPU, the GeForce 256, in 1999 and as the technology became more and more powerful academic researchers realised it could accelerate AI development. Nvidia GPUs were used to create AlexNet, the neural network developed by Alex Krizhevsky, the OpenAI-co-founder Ilya Sutskever and the Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in 2012 \u2013 and a key moment<\/a> in the history of modern AI.<\/p>\n Jensen Huang make a keynote address at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2018. Photograph: Rick Wilking\/Reuters<\/p>\n Six months after the launch of ChatGPT, Nvidia\u2019s valuation reached $1tn (\u00a3756bn) in May 2023 and kept growing, hitting $5tn on October last year \u2013 the first ever company to reach such a milestone<\/a>. However, it has fallen to about $4tn this week after allegations that Huang had conducted affairs with a Chinese spy and an Nvidia executive, leading to his resignation on Thursday.<\/p>\n Huang\u2019s 3.6% stake in Nvidia has given him considerable wealth. His fortune is valued at $145bn, according to Bloomberg, the 13th highest in the world.<\/p>\n graph showing Nvidia\u2019s share price over time<\/a><\/p>\n The importance of Nvidia\u2019s products to the AI revolution have made Huang rich, powerful and famous. He is often seen at tech conferences or in the presence of global leaders, including Donald Trump with whom he has developed a rapport. Meta\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, another mighty Silicon Valley founder, has described Huang as \u201cTaylor Swift, but for tech\u201d.<\/p>\n Jensen Huang, left, and Mark Zuckerberg, second, right, arrive near the White House before meeting Donald Trump in September. Photograph: Oliver Contreras\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n One UK tech industry insider who has met Huang at various tech and government events describes the Nvidia CEO as having an \u201cability to engage\u201d that marked him out from other executives in his peer group.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s like a good politician,\u201d said the source. \u201cI think the sector has lost one of its best communicators.\u201d<\/p>\n The sources added that Huang had no problem getting access to the upper echelons of governments. \u201cEveryone wanted to meet him.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Huang\u2019s undoubted drive and charisma had a flipside, according to Stephen Witt, a journalist who interviewed the executive as part of his award-winning book about Huang and his company, The Thinking Games. In his final chat with a \u201cvisibly exhausted\u201d Huang in 2024, Witt describes the interviewee\u2019s voice \u201ccrescendoing with anger\u201d as he mulls a question about what new jobs will be created by AI.<\/p>\n Railing against the perception that AI will take jobs, Huang says to Witt: \u201cWe make the marginal cost of things zero, generation after generation after generation, and this exact conversation happens every single time!\u201d<\/p>\n A shocked Witt writes: \u201cHis anger seemed uncontained, omnidirectional and wildly inappropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n Jensen Huang at a restaurant in Taipei last year with Alice Huang, no relation, who is accused of being a Chinese spy. Photograph: TVBS\/AP<\/p>\n Although, to be clear, Witt also states in the book: \u201cHuang possessed magnetic charisma, could be funny as hell, and, when he wasn\u2019t losing his shit, was capable of warmth and great empathetic understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n The anger in this last confrontation wears off, according to Witt, as Huang adds: \u201cI am super normal.\u201d<\/p>\n And it is a very normal failing, extramarital infidelity, that has brought Huang down. It is a lesson in humility that Nvidia, and its investors, were not expecting Huang to receive decades on from those shifts at Denny\u2019s.<\/p>\n On Monday 30 November, join Dan Milmo and Prof Dame Wendy Hall and Stuart J Russell as they discuss the warnings surrounding artificial intelligence and how we can separate fact from speculation. Livestreamed only. Book tickets here<\/a> or at guardian.live<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jensen Huang wasn\u2019t always in his trademark leather jacket. 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