Jensen Huang spent 30 years building for a market that did not exist yet
How Nvidia’s co-founder turned a graphics-chip company into the backbone of the AI economy.
In 1993, Jensen Huang and two co-founders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, started Nvidia with a bet on 3D graphics for personal computers. The idea was famously sketched out at a Denny’s in San Jose. Three decades later, chips that descend from that bet train most of the world’s large AI models, and Huang has run the company the entire time.
Huang was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States as a child. He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and later at Stanford, and worked as a chip designer at LSI Logic and AMD before founding Nvidia.
The long bet
Nvidia marketed its GeForce 256 in 1999 as the first GPU. In 2006 it released CUDA, a platform that let programmers use graphics chips for general computing. For years the investment looked expensive for a company whose customers were mostly gamers.
Then researchers found that GPUs were well suited to training neural networks. AlexNet, the 2012 image-recognition model that helped start the deep learning boom, was trained on Nvidia GPUs. The data center became Nvidia’s largest business, and in July 2025 it became the first public company to pass $4 trillion in market value.
How he runs it
Huang is known for an unusually flat structure, with around 60 people reporting to him directly. He has said he prefers to share information with groups rather than in one-on-one meetings, so that everyone hears the same thing at the same time.
What to watch
Nvidia’s challenges now come from its own success. Export controls on chip sales to China have repeatedly affected its business, and its largest customers, the cloud providers, are designing their own AI chips. AMD is competing directly in data center accelerators.
- Company
- Nvidia
- Role
- Co-founder, President & CEO
- HQ
- Santa Clara, California
- Founded
- 1993
- Section
- AI
This profile draws on public reporting and company materials.
Sources: Wikipedia: Jensen Huang · Wikipedia: Nvidia · Wikipedia: AlexNet
Photo: Anderseidesvik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
