Huang, 61, always wears a leather jacket, and former employees describe him as a serious but low-key manager. In recent months, he has become a star as his company has become the fulcrum of the artificial intelligence boom. The company's microchips, known as Gpus, are at the heart of how systems like ChatGPT run and have become the most indispensable commodity in the tech world.

At a tech conference in Taiwan this month, the Taiwan-born Huang was mobbed by crowds, snapping selfies and dancing with influencers. At one point, a female fan asked him to sign a top on her chest; Huang, after wondering aloud whether this was a good idea, agreed.

picture

When a social media fan asked who the Nvidia boss was, Mark Zuckerberg called him "the Taylor Swift of tech." This phenomenon is known as the Jensen phenomenon.

"That week, my whole social media was' Jason, Jason, Jason. ' At a certain point, you feel like Jason is running the country now, "said Jason Hsu, who focuses on the technology sector.

picture

If this sounds like a victory, it is well deserved. Huang worked at microchip company AMD before co-founding Nvidia in 1991. At the time, he washed dishes at a Denny's fast-food restaurant (above the table where Huang and his co-founders conceived the company now hangs a plaque, installed when Nvidia was worth more than $1 trillion).

The company focused early on video games, developing components that allowed game consoles and personal computers to present three-dimensional graphics by stacking countless tiny triangles. The company went public during the dot-com bubble and was valued at $625 million.

While the company has become a major player in the gaming industry, it wasn't until a decade later that it planted the seeds of its current success. In 2012, scientists at the University of Toronto, led by British computer scientist Geoff Hinton, developed an image-recognition program that used Nvidia's graphics chips instead of the central processing unit that most computers rely on.

Hinton later described it as the "big bang moment" of today's AI movement. Built on two Nvidia chips purchased from Amazon, the program beat competitors in the annual machine vision race, and its underlying architecture spawned a deep learning boom.

Nvidia's chips are perfect for machine vision, which can be said to be an unexpected surprise, but Huang jumped at the chance. While AI is still a secondary academic pursuit compared to the lucrative video game business, Huang told managers that Nvidia will become an AI business and devote resources to developing advanced chips that can power AI.

"It turned out to be really useful and we could do things with it that we didn't know about before," says a former Nvidia executive, "but even then you could tell [Huang] had embraced the idea that Gpus could be used for things other than graphics and gaming."

"He had a vision at the time that it would do something, and he probably didn't know what it would be, but he saw opportunities that a lot of people didn't see."

"He was building a church and had been building it brick by brick for years," Hsu said. "One day you suddenly see this magnificent church in front of you, but he has worked for years to make it perfect."

Huang also believes these chips can do more. In 2016, he asked his team to build an AI server using those chips, which ended up being as big as a briefcase and costing $129,000 to make. He then hand-delivered the server to OpenAI as a gift.

Currently, tens of thousands of Nvidia chips power OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The rewards are now clear. Last month, Nvidia said revenue rose 262 percent to $26 billion in the last quarter. Profits increased more than sevenfold, from $2 billion to $15 billion. The waiting list for the company's superchips runs into next year.

Jen-hsun Huang has been building relationships with key customers and suppliers for many years, personally delivering the first orders. At the same time, he has tightly integrated users with a software system that has kept the company on an unassailable lead even as rivals try to get a piece of the action.

While Huang appears approachable in public, inside Nvidia he has a reputation for being demanding. Huang even asks junior employees how they are doing and can send hundreds of emails a day to executives.

"He's not the type to brag," one former employee said. "There is no hiding place for anyone who can work in Jensen's world, whether successful or unsuccessful." People who struggle with him don't usually respond to mistakes in the right way."

"Any weakness, real or imagined, will be pointed out," said another former executive. One of Huang's own missteps came in 2020, when he agreed to buy British microchip company Arm for $40 billion. Nearly two years later, regulators rejected the deal, something Huang still regrets.

picture

It's not easy to live up to his standards. Huang is known to wake up at 4am (" As a CEO, it's a good choice not to sleep, "he once said). Huang told Wired this year that his exercise routine consisted mostly of squatting while brushing his teeth.

"Greatness comes from character," Huang told students at Stanford University earlier this year. Character is not formed by the wise, but by those who suffer." "I'm very happy to use the term 'pain and suffering' internally," he added.

Huang's obsession with pain eventually led him to get a tattoo of the Nvidia logo when the stock hit $100 in 2014, and the pain made him cry. He attributes his resilience to being sent to boarding school in Kentucky at the age of nine, where he was subjected to relentless racist bullying.

These days, most Nvidia employees would say any pain is worth it. The stock is up 3,500% over the past five years, meaning that even employees who have been with the company for a short time have enough paper wealth to retire. A mid-level employee who worked at the company for 18 years recently left with a $62 million retirement package.

Huang himself isn't a fan of flaunting wealth, except for a $9,000 leather jacket -- at least by the standards of most tech billionaires. He spent about $55 million on real estate, including a villa in Hawaii, but reportedly drives a Tesla to work despite his Ferrari collection.

Caution may be in order. Nvidia's market capitalization surpassing that of Microsoft and Apple is seen as the peak of the new Internet bubble.

The company's profits, while growing strongly, are less than half Apple's and are built on runaway spending on AI infrastructure that has yet to deliver tangible profits for many of its customers. The company's rise is similar to that of Cisco, a networking equipment company that overtook Microsoft during the dot-com bubble but never recovered.

Nvidia's stock price has fallen since its peak last week, with the company falling behind Apple and Microsoft and its market value falling below $3 trillion, which could add to those concerns.

Some analysts attributed the drop to a bout of profit-taking, and many believe the only way forward is up.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it would cost about $7 trillion to build a superintelligence capable of outperforming humans. Much of that could end up in Nvidia's hands.

Last week, some analysts predicted that Nvidia would be valued at $5 trillion within a year, at which point Huang's net worth would surpass Bill Gates and put him in contention for the title of the world's richest man. Only then will Mr. Huang truly be worth celebrating.

Speaking at the shareholders' meeting about the growing competition

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said Wednesday that the company's strength in artificial intelligence chips stems from a bet made more than a decade ago around billions of dollars in AI investment and a team of thousands of engineers.

Huang made the comments during a question-and-answer session at Nvidia's shareholder meeting. Its shares have surged more than 200 per cent in the past year. Wall Street has been fascinated by the company's dominance of the AI chip market.

Nvidia recently split its stock 1:10, valuing it at more than $3 trillion and briefly becoming the most valuable publicly traded company.

The first question Huang answered Wednesday was about the company's competition, as both traditional chipmakers and startups launch products aimed at challenging Nvidia's more than 80 percent market share in artificial intelligence chips.

Nvidia shares fell more than 1 percent in Wednesday trading.

Without naming competitors, Huang laid out the company's overall strategy to stay ahead, starting with the fact that Nvidia has "transformed" from its former gaming business into a data center business. The company also wants to open up new markets for its AI, such as industrial robotics, and plans to work with every computer maker and cloud provider.

Huang said its AI chips offer the "lowest total cost of ownership," suggesting that while other chips may be cheaper, Nvidia's chips are more economical given their performance and running costs.

Ultimately, Huang said Nvidia has achieved a "virtuous cycle," a tech industry term for when a platform has the most users, it can make the improvements necessary to attract more users.

"The NVIDIA platform is widely available through major cloud providers and computer manufacturers, creating a large and attractive installed base for developers and customers, which makes our platform even more valuable to customers," Huang said.

Nvidia shareholders were pleased with the company's performance and approved a non-binding vote on executive compensation, known as the "pay vote." Nvidia executives' compensation is made up of salary and a variety of restricted stock units.

According to the company's annual filing, Huang received compensation valued at about $34 million in the company's fiscal year 2024, a 60 percent increase from 2023.