What you need to know about Jensen Huang, the AI visionary in a leather jacket

NEW YORK – Unknown to the public just three years ago, Mr Jensen Huang is now one of the most powerful entrepreneurs in the world as head of chip giant Nvidia.

The unassuming 62-year-old draws stadium crowds of more than 10,000 people as his company’s products push the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI).

Chips designed by Nvidia, known as graphics cards or graphics processing units (GPUs), are essential in developing the generative AI powering technology like ChatGPT.

Big Tech’s insatiable appetite for Nvidia’s GPUs, which sell for tens of thousands of dollars each, has catapulted the

California chipmaker beyond US$4 trillion

(S$5.1 trillion) in market valuation,

the first company ever to surpass that mark.

Nvidia’s meteoric rise has boosted Mr Huang’s personal fortune to US$150 billion – making him one of the world’s richest people – thanks to the roughly 3.5 per cent stake he holds in the company he founded three decades ago with two friends in a Silicon Valley diner.

In a clear demonstration of his clout, he recently convinced US President Donald Trump to lift restrictions on certain GPU exports to China, despite the fact that China is locked in a battle with the United States for AI supremacy.

“That was brilliantly done,” said governance professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University.

Mr Huang was able to explain to Mr Trump that “having the world using a US tech platform as the core protocol is definitely in the interest of this country” and will not help the Chinese military, Prof Sonnenfeld said.

Early life

Born in Taipei in 1963, Mr Jensen Huang (originally named Jen-Hsun) embodies the American success story. At nine years old, he was sent with his brother to boarding school in small-town Kentucky.

His uncle recommended the school to his Taiwanese parents, believing it to be a prestigious institution, when it was actually a school for troubled youth.

Too young to be a student, Mr Huang boarded there but attended a nearby public school alongside the children of tobacco farmers. With his poor English, he was bullied and forced to clean toilets – a two-year ordeal that transformed him.

“We worked really hard, we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough,” he recounted in an interview with US broadcaster NPR.

But “the ending of the story is, I loved the time I was there”, Mr Huang said.

Leather jacket and tattoo

Brought home by his parents, who had by then settled in the north-western US state of Oregon, he graduated from university at just 20 and joined Advanced Micro Devices, then LSI Logic, to design chips – his passion.

But he wanted to go further and founded Nvidia in 1993 to “solve problems that normal computers can’t”, using semiconductors powerful enough to handle 3D graphics, as he explained on the No Priors podcast.

Nvidia created the first GPU in 1999, riding the intersection of video games, data centres, cloud computing and now, generative AI.

Always dressed in a black T-shirt and leather jacket, Mr Huang sports an Nvidia logo tattoo and has a taste for sports cars.

But it is his relentless optimism, low-key personality and lack of political alignment that sets him apart from the likes of Mr Elon Musk and Mr Mark Zuckerberg.

Unlike them, Mr Huang was notably absent from Mr Trump’s inauguration ceremony.

“He backpedals his own aura and lets the star be the technology rather than himself,” observed Prof Sonnenfeld, who believes Mr Huang may be “the most respected of all today’s tech titans”.

One former high-ranking Nvidia employee described him to AFP as “the most driven person” he had ever met.

Street food

On visits to his native Taiwan, Mr Huang is treated like a megastar, with fans crowding him for autographs and selfies as journalists follow him to the barber shop and his favourite night market.

“He has created the phenomenon because of his personal charm,” said Mr Wayne Lin of Witology Market Trend Research Institute.

“A person like him must be very busy and his schedule should be full every day meeting big bosses. But he remembers to eat street food when he comes to Taiwan,” he said, describing Mr Huang as “unusually friendly”.

Nvidia is a tight ship and takes great care to project a drama-free image of Mr Huang.

But the former high-ranking employee painted a more nuanced picture, describing a “very paradoxical” individual who is fiercely protective of his employees but also capable, within Nvidia’s executive circle, of “ripping people to shreds” over major mistakes or poor choices. AFP