Maurya Srivastava
Under the job experience tab on his Linkedin profile, Jensen Huang only has two entries: waiter and busboy at Denny’s, and CEO of the Silicon Valley multibillion dollar chip manufacturer Nvidia. The tech mogul personally owns around 3% of his company’s stock (which currently sits at around $120 per share) and is estimated by Forbes to be the 14th richest man in the world, worth just over 118 billion dollars. Not even five years ago, Nvidia only sat at $5 per share. Where did this seemingly impossible success come from?
In 1963, Jensen Huang was born in Taiwan. At the age of nine, Huang and his older brother moved from Thailand to live with their uncle in Tacoma, Washington. When Huang was ten, he was sent to an elementary school in Kentucky, a religious reform academy that his uncle had mistakenly believed to be a prestigious boarding school. The only Asian-American at the school, Huang was frequently bullied, being made to scrub the dormitory toilets, and often dealing with knife-wielding ruffians. However, the Nvidia CEO says, looking back, that his time at that school was perhaps the most transformative experience of his life– a crucible that provided him with the grit and perseverance he would need to steer his business through tough times. In an address at his former school, Stanford University, the CEO proclaimed: “I hope suffering happens to you.” Huang graduated from Stanford with a master’s in electrical engineering, and, after a short stint at another company, laid the foundations for his own company in the early 1990s.
In 1993, Nvidia was founded in the same San Jose Denny’s that is listed on Huang’s Linkedin. It was one of nearly 100 companies that believed video game-based graphics processing was the future of computing; the company’s early days were marked by turmoil. In the late 90s, Nvidia was on the verge of bankruptcy after exhausting an initial 20 million dollar investment and failing to secure a lucrative contract with Sega. During this economic turbulence, however, Nvidia caught its first break: a five million dollar investment from the same corporation that had turned it down a year earlier. This infusion of capital breathed new life into Nvidia, allowing Huang and his team to focus on their vision of revolutionizing graphics processing. Their breakthrough came with the release of the RIVA (Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator) series of graphics cards, which set new standards for 3D performance and became a cornerstone in the gaming and professional graphics markets. Nvidia subsequently secured a 200 million dollar deal to develop Microsoft’s Xbox console, and was listed on the S&P 500 in 2001. It continues to make GPUs (graphics processing units) intended for gaming.
While the company has found relative success making gaming hardware, Nvidia’s true success comes from the advent of a technology many of us are already familiar with: artificial intelligence. Having acquired rivals in the computer processing field throughout the 2010s, Nvidia was left as the sole juggernaut in the GPU industry in the early 2020s, dominating the video game space. It also turned out that GPUs could perform calculations simultaneously, unlike regular CPUs (central processing units), making them more energy-efficient and better suited for handling complex computing tasks. With companies needing to train their AI models like ChatGPT on datasets numbering in the hundreds of millions, Nvidia GPUs became the ideal choice for AI development. Today, the perfect mix of prohibitive entry costs into the chip industry and Nvidia’s head start on those who can afford those costs means that the company is able to charge a premium for its products–the latest Nvidia chips sell for $30,000-40,000 dollars each. and tech companies usually place billion dollar orders for tens of thousands of chips. Nvidia’s stock has skyrocketed: today: its valuation approaches $3 trillion, nearly rivaling Apple and Microsoft’s respective market capitalizations. Through Jensen Huang’s leadership, the company has transformed from an idea at a local Denny’s
The Dutch Report 