HELLO, MISTER CHIPS
From job at Denny's to Nvidia's AI Super Bird
JENSEN Huang is on a rocket ship to eclipse Elon Musk as one of the world’s richest men thanks to the explosive share price of Nvidia, the computer chip-making company he founded and where he is CEO.
The Silicon Valley firm manufactures the highly advanced chips that power artificial intelligence, making it the hottest commodity in the world and giving Huang his exponential growth in net worth.
Huang, 61, is currently worth $68.6 billion, according to Forbes, more than double what he was worth last February and 25 times what he was worth in 2017, when it first recorded him as a billionaire.
The colossal growth has led to comparisons with Musk in part because Musk relies on Nvidia’s chips to fuel his artificial-intelligence projects. Like the Twitter and SpaceX owner, Huang is an immigrant whose technology company has the potential to transform how we live, not to mention a Tesla fan. Nvidia, however, is worth three times Tesla.
But his real role model may well be another Silicon Valley titan: Steve Jobs, the late Apple CEO.
Like Jobs, Huang wears a signature outfit every day — a rockstar-style leather jacket and black pants — and has a distinctive campus for his company: Its 1.2 million-square-foot headquarters in Santa Clara is modeled on the “Star Trek: Voyager” spacecraft.
And like Jobs, he lives to work. “He didn’t really do anything but Apple,” a Silicon Valley source said. “Huang is the same way.”
Dishwasher’s ‘grit’
But his rise is even more astonishing than that of the other tech billionaires: Huang was sent to the US by his parents at age 9, speaking no English, then worked summers in Denny’s and took 8 years to get his master’s degree.
One source who has known Huang for decades said the “grit and resilience” that propelled him to become one of the world’s richest men in his 60s came from his experience as an immigrant.
Huang was born Jen-Hsun (he has Anglicized it to Jensen) in Taiwan and spent his early childhood in Thailand.
Seeking an education for their nephews, they enrolled him in what they believed was a prestigious boarding school, Oneida Baptist Institute.
In fact it was a school in Kentucky which focused on troubled youth. Huang scrubbed toilets and faced bullies with pocket knives, he told Wired.
But he “loved it” and that being there was a “lucky break,” he told its graduating class of 2020 in a commencement address.
His parents arrived in the Pacific Northwest and settled outside Portland, Ore., where he got his first job at 15 — washing dishes at Denny’s — and worked there every summer for years to come: “Excellent career choice. I highly recommend everyone start your first job in the restaurant business, it teaches you humility, hard work.”
Huang chose Oregon State University partly for its low in-state tuition — and found himself paired with one of the only female electrical engineering students, Lori Mills, which he called “the second big break of my life.” They have now been married for more than 30 years.
He started working for chip companies immediately after graduating but by his own admission was not on a rapid path to the very top; he spent eight parttime years on his Stanford master’s.
Napkin plan
Then around Thanksgiving 1993, he and two colleagues, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, met at a Denny’s in South Bay. While he ate a Super Bird, which he has called a “great sandwich . . . bacon’s the best part,” they sketched their plan for their own chip company on a napkin.
They founded Nvidia with $40,000 and worked out of a condo in Fremont.
It went public in 1999, at $4 a share, making Huang wealthy but hardly an instant billionaire. Priem sold almost all his stock before he left in 2003 to move offgrid; Malachowsky is involved with Nvidia as a “fellow” and is also a billionaire thanks to his smaller stock holding.
The chips were first developed for computer graphics, which put the firm at the forefront of developing ultra-powerful processors.
Early focus
But Huang went public with his ambition about providing the chips for AI in 2014, saying the company was turning its focus to chips for machine learning, the technology that trains AI.
That same year, Huang revealed a tattoo of Nvidia’s logo on his shoulder in honor of the stock hitting $100 per share.
He owns 3.5% of the company, making his wealth balloon as Nvidia’s shares soar. In just the last month, he gained $10 billion as the price hit new highs.
The onetime Denny’s bus boy has so far eschewed the biggest purchases of flashy billionaires but lives in a $44 million, 11,400square-foot home on San Francisco’s “billionaires row” next to Oracle’s Larry Ellison, oil scion Gordon Getty and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
His billions have not made Huang less hungry. He says he still wakes up “worried and concerned” about the company’s future and remains obsessed with what AI will create next — and more importantly, if he will be the one powering its creation, sources said.
That anxiety has pushed Huang to make investments through Nvidia both in rival chipmakers and in artificial-intelligence companies as a way to diversify.
Last year Ben-Zion Benkhin, the CEO of Wombo.ai — which can make deepfakes of people singing — received an invitation to speak with Huang at Nvidia headquarters about a possible investment.
“Probably the busiest person on the planet and he’s making time to meet with founders and make investments,” a source involved with the meeting said. “He’s not slowing down.”