Jensen Huang

Before NVIDIA, Jensen Huang worked at AMD and then LSI Logic, where his roles included leading a business focused on systems-on-a-chip. He earned an electrical-engineering degree from Oregon State University and a master’s degree in the same field from Stanford. In 1993, he founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem around a conviction that the PC would become a machine for gaming and multimedia and that graphics would require a new class of specialized chips.^1,2,3

The path that followed connects several long-duration bets. NVIDIA introduced the GPU in 1999, opened the parallel-processing capabilities of its chips to researchers through CUDA in 2006, and participated in deep learning’s inflection when its GPUs powered AlexNet in 2012. That continuity sits at the center of Huang’s career: sustaining an architecture, a software ecosystem, and an organization capable of serving markets that may not yet exist at meaningful scale.³