Jensen Huang

Jen-Hsun Huang (Chinese: 黃仁勳; Tâi-lô: N̂g Jîn-hun; pronounced approximately /ˈhwɑːŋ/ or as "Hwong" rhyming with "song" with a soft initial 'H' or 'W' sound in English), commonly anglicized as Jensen Huang (pronounced /ˈdʒɛnsən ˈhwɑːŋ/), is an American businessman and electrical engineer who co-founded NVIDIA Corporation in 1993 and has served as its president and chief executive officer since its inception. Under his leadership, NVIDIA has become a global leader in graphics processing units (GPUs), accelerating advancements in gaming, artificial intelligence , and high-performance computing , with the company's market capitalization exceeding $4 trillion by 2025, becoming the world's most valuable publicly traded company as of November 2025. In 2025, Huang described compute as the new infrastructure, likening AI data centers to "AI factories" that apply energy to produce valuable tokens, similar to electricity or the internet. He emphasized three scaling laws driving AI progress: pretraining (more data, parameters, and compute predictably improve models), post-training (refining models via compute-intensive techniques such as reinforcement learning), and test-time compute (dynamic compute for real-time reasoning in advanced architectures), fueling exponential demand for NVIDIA's GPU platforms and envisioning an AI infrastructure industry worth trillions of dollars.

Born in 1963 in Tainan , Taiwan , Huang moved to Thailand as a child before immigrating to the United States at age nine amid civil unrest. He earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University .

Along with engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, Huang established NVIDIA to address challenges in 3D graphics for personal computers, initially operating from a modest booth at a trade show. Key innovations under his tenure include the 1999 launch of the GeForce 256, the world's first GPU, and the 2006 introduction of CUDA, a platform that enabled GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing and fueled breakthroughs in AI, such as powering the 2012 AlexNet neural network. Huang owns approximately 3% of NVIDIA, which went public in 1999, and resides in Los Altos, California, as a U.S. citizen.

Huang has received numerous accolades for his contributions to technology, including election to the National Academy of Engineering , the IEEE Founder’s Medal, the Robert N. Noyce Award, and recognition as one of TIME's 100 most influential people; he was named a 2024 Fellow of the Computer History Museum for leadership in graphics, computing, and AI, and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2025. A philanthropist, he has donated $50 million to Oregon State University and $30 million to Stanford University in 2022 to support engineering and AI research.

Jensen Huang was born on February 17, 1963, in Taipei, Taiwan, then part of the Republic of China. His parents were native speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien, and his family background is Taiwanese with no reported Jewish ancestry or heritage. His religion is not publicly disclosed in reliable sources; there is no mention or evidence that he is Jewish. He was the second son of immigrant parents; his father was a chemical engineer , and his mother was a grade school teacher who later taught him and his brother English by selecting random words from the dictionary each day. Huang spent his early childhood in Taiwan , attending local schools before his family relocated to Thailand when he was five years old due to his father's work opportunities.

In 1972, amid social unrest in Thailand, Huang's parents sold nearly all their possessions to send their nine-year-old son and his eleven-year-old older brother to the United States as unaccompanied minors , initially to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington .