The most powerful boss in technology
Between February 21 and 22, Jensen Huang earned $10 billion (€9.246 billion). In twenty-four hours, the 61-year-old entrepreneur’s fortune rose from $59 billion to $69 billion thanks to the success of his semiconductor company Nvidia. In the last quarter of 2023, sales of the company, which produces graphics chips essential for the operation of new artificial intelligence models, increased by 265%. Sales of $22 billion in just three months allowed the new tech giant to be valued at $2 trillion, more than Amazon and Google. Fields as varied as the autonomous car industry, pharmaceutical laboratories and financial institutions now call on Jensen Huang’s company.
A super student
Jensen Huang compares the ease with which he did homework in middle and high school “Superpower”. Born in Taiwan in 1963, this brilliant student arrived in the United States before the age of 10, without his parents. The young boy was placed in a boarding school in Kentucky by his uncle and eventually joined his father and mother when they managed to settle in Oregon. He excelled at table tennis, skipped double digits and excelled in his engineering studies at the public University of Oregon before attending Stanford University in California. With Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, Jensen Huang imagines Nvidia in April 1993. Like the best tech legends, the three co-founders say the company was founded over breakfast at Denny’s, a chain of dinners very popular Americans. At the time, artificial intelligence was just a science fiction dream and video games were still a niche hobby.
A nerd who was way ahead of his time
In 1995, two years after its founding, Nvidia was almost bankrupt due to the launch of the first processor, which cost about $10 million to develop. Almost no company is interested in this product that can significantly improve the graphics of video games. Jensen Huang is forced to fire half of his eighty employees. But in 1997, Nvidia’s third chip, the RIVA 128, four times more powerful than other graphics cards of the time, sold 1 million units in a few months. The company takes off and its chips support the development of well-known game consoles, such as the PlayStation.