Jensen Huang

The co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA — the leather-jacketed engineer whose 30-year bet on the GPU put his company at the center of the artificial-intelligence era.

Jensen Huang (born February 17, 1963, in Tainan, Taiwan) is a Taiwanese-American businessman, electrical engineer, and the co-founder, president, and chief executive officer of NVIDIA, the semiconductor company whose graphics processors became the standard hardware of modern AI.

This site is a neutral, evidence-based reference. Every quotation cites a source; uncertain dates and disputed claims carry their attribution; and reported figures (such as net-worth estimates) are flagged as reported, not confirmed.

Where to start

• Start here — the five-minute overview
• Biography — from Tainan to Silicon Valley
• The founding of NVIDIA — April 1993, a Denny’s in San Jose
• The GPU revolution — from video games to the GeForce 256
• CUDA and AI — the bet that made NVIDIA an AI company
• Leadership — how he runs the company
• Sayings — verbatim quotes, each with its source

The arc in brief

Huang was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1963 and moved with his family to Thailand as a child. At age nine he was sent with his brother to the United States, where he attended the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, then high school in Oregon. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984 and a master’s from Stanford University in 1992, while working as a chip designer at LSI Logic and then AMD.

In 1993, at 30 years old, he co-founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The company nearly died twice in its first years — surviving on a failed first chip (the NV1), a lost Sega contract it was released from, and one famous rescue: RIVA 128 in 1997. The GeForce 256 (1999) established the modern GPU; CUDA (2007) turned it into a general computing platform; and the deep-learning boom of the 2010s turned NVIDIA into the indispensable hardware supplier of the AI era.

Huang is known for his black leather-jacketed keynote performances at GTC, NVIDIA’s developer conference, and for an unusually hands-on, flat management style — he has described having dozens of direct reports and reasoning through problems in public with his leadership team.

Living-person note

Jensen Huang is alive and active as of this site’s writing (September 2026). This reference presents documented facts with citations and distinguishes reported claims from confirmed ones. Wealth figures, in particular, are treated as reported estimates that change daily — never as facts.

Source notes

Key facts on this page draw on NVIDIA’s corporate history, Huang’s public interviews and commencement addresses, Stanford SIEPR and GTC keynote coverage, and profiles published by major business outlets. Page-level citations live on each article; see Sources and Methodology for the full approach.