Jensen Huang: Nvidia CEO Who Built the World’s Most Valuable Firm
From washing dishes at Denny's to leading a $5 trillion company - the story of Nvidia's founder, his childhood in reform school, and the CUDA bet that won AI.
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Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 at a Denny’s restaurant where he had washed dishes as a teenager, and has been its CEO for 33 years. Today it is the world’s most valuable company, and he is the seventh richest person on Earth. Here are the verified facts: childhood between Taiwan, Thailand and a reform school in Kentucky, Nvidia’s early days, how it won its position in AI, and what Huang says about the future of work. Sources checked September 17, 2026.
| Who | founder, president and CEO of Nvidia (since 1993) |
| Born | February 17, 1963, Taipei, Taiwan (63 years old); Taiwanese and US citizenship |
| Education | electrical engineering at Oregon State University (1984), master’s at Stanford (1992, evening program) |
| Previously | microprocessor designer at AMD, director at LSI Logic |
| Net worth | Forbes estimate for 2026: over $200 billion; seventh place worldwide |
| Personal | wife Lori (married 1985), two children; cousin is Lisa Su, CEO of AMD |
Childhood: Taiwan, Bangkok and Reform School in Kentucky
Huang was born in Taipei to a chemical engineer and a teacher who taught her sons ten English words from the dictionary every day. When he was five, the family moved to Thailand, and in 1973, at age nine, his parents sent him and his brother to live with an uncle in the US. The uncle mistakenly enrolled the boys at Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, a school for troubled youth, thinking it was an elite boarding school. Huang cleaned toilets daily, was beaten by older students, learned to play table tennis well enough to be featured in Sports Illustrated at age 14, and taught his scar-covered roommate to read in exchange for lessons in bench pressing. He said he remembers Kentucky “more vividly than anything else” in his life.
Denny’s, AMD and the Idea for Nvidia
After his family moved to Oregon, he finished high school at 16, worked the night shift at Denny’s from age 15, and studied electrical engineering at Oregon State because it had the lowest tuition. He designed processors at AMD, then at LSI Logic met Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, with whom he built the GX graphics chip for Sun Microsystems. In 1993, at a table at Denny’s in San Jose, the three founded Nvidia; Huang was 30 and has not changed his position since. In the 1990s the company came close to bankruptcy before the RIVA card and the first “GPU,” the GeForce 256 (1999), gave it a position in the gaming market.
Why AI Runs on Nvidia Cards
The decision that built today’s Nvidia came in 2006: the CUDA platform allowed graphics cards to be programmed for general computation, not just graphics. For years investors considered this a waste of money, until in 2012 the AlexNet neural network, trained on two GeForce cards, won an image recognition competition and showed that deep learning needed exactly these kinds of chips. Since the launch of ChatGPT, demand for Nvidia accelerators has exceeded production, and in October 2025 the company became the first in history to exceed $5 trillion in market capitalization. How this position translates to AI model pricing and subscriptions, we described in the article Jensen Huang: the man who bet on AI.
What He Says About AI and Work
Huang repeats that programming in natural languages will make “everyone a programmer,” and that engineers now prefer to build agents rather than write code manually, which we covered in the article engineers prefer building agents. He treats AI safety as an engineering problem, not a legal one, which distinguishes him from Dario Amodei and Sam Altman calling in September 2026 for slowing down; we analyzed his position in the article Huang on AI safety. We sketched the profile of the “pickaxe seller in the gold rush” in the article Jensen Huang: the man who sells pickaxes.
Google · Your sourcesQuantslant higher in your Google - one clickAdd to preferred sources →Most Common Questions
How old is Jensen Huang?
63. He was born February 17, 1963 in Taipei.
What is Jensen Huang’s net worth?
Forbes estimates his wealth in 2026 at over $200 billion, almost entirely in Nvidia stock, of which he owns about 3.5 percent. That is seventh place on the list of the world’s richest people.
Why does Jensen Huang always wear a leather jacket?
He explains it simply: he chose one outfit so as not to waste time on clothing decisions. The black leather jacket has become the trademark of his presentations.
Sources checked September 17, 2026: Wikipedia EN “Jensen Huang” with citations (Forbes, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Nvidia press releases), our earlier articles about Huang.
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