Jensen Huang

Some Lesser Known Facts About Jensen Huang

• Jensen Huang’s family shifted to Thailand from Taiwan, when he was five.

• His father used to work for the American airconditioning company, Carrier, and later, decided to move his family to the United States.

• He has often mentioned how his mother prepared her children for their life in the United States by insisting they learn new English words daily.

• When he was nine, his parents sent him and his elder brother to their uncle in Tacoma, Washington.

• His uncle admitted them to Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, mistakenly thinking of the reform institution as one of the premier educational organizations.

• He and his brother faced several hardships at the institute such as cleaning toilets, working on a tobacco farm, and getting bullied by fellow students.

• When his parents discovered the situation, they shifted the boys to Aloha High School in Oregon, where the family relocated.

• He played competitive table tennis and was on the national team during his student days.

• He was a brilliant student who graduated early from school at the age of 16.

• He met his wife, Lori Mills, a fellow engineering student and his lab partner, at Oregon State University.

• In the 1980s, he worked as a busboy and waiter at a diner and restaurant chain named Denny’s.

• After completing his engineering in 1984, he moved to Silicon Valley in Northern California, where he worked at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) as a microprocessor designer for a year after which he joined LSI Logic Corporation.

  

• While working at LSI Logic, he completed his Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1992.

  

• He was the director of Coreware at LSI Logic Corporation when he resigned and started his business, Nvidia, with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993.

• Most of the preliminary discussions between the three of them happened at one of the outlets of Denny’s in East San Jose, California and they decided to focus on accelerated computing.

• They had an initial capital of US$40,000 between them. They soon procured an investment of US$20 million from venture capital firms with which they created Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for the video game industry.

• According to Jensen Huang, he and his friends were unclear on how the business would work out initially and faced multiple setbacks and difficulties.

• The launch of the Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator, RIVA 128 or NV3 in August 1997 was crucial to the company’s success as the finances at the time were low. Jensen Huang often referred to this in many of his keynote presentations.

• The company, Nvidia Corporation, was incorporated in Delaware and its headquarters is in Santa Clara, California. It became a public enterprise on 22 January 1999.

• In 2007, he and his wife registered a non-profit organization, Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation, for their philanthropy works.

• In 2008, Nvidia funded the Beijing Haidian Foreign Language Shi Yan School to construct classrooms for students affected by the Wenchuan Earthquake in China.

• Jensen Huang, at the 2018 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, remarked that Nvidia’s GPUs are advancing more rapidly than suggested by Moore’s law that the media coined the reference as Huang’s Law.

• The market capitalization of Nvidia and the net worth of Jensen Huang increased considerably, during the AI boom, with Nvidia’s GPUs, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and system-on-a-chip units (SOCs) being used in various industries such as autonomous vehicle technology and mobile computing.

• He follows a flat management structure with around 60 direct reports which according to him, empowers the people and helps in problem-solving.

• He highly emphasizes communication and considers direct interaction with the employees particularly effective.

• Jensen Huang and his wife donated $2 million to Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, funding the construction of a girls’ dormitory and classrooms that were opened in 2019.

  

• In 2022, Jensen and Lori Huang contributed US$50 million to Oregon State University to build a supercomputing institute (Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex) inside the campus.

  

• Jensen and Lori Huang also gave US$30 million as funding for the Jen-Hsun Engineering Centre, a building housing the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. It was opened in October 2023.

• Mark Zuckerberg is a close associate of Jensen Huang. He once posted a picture with Huang on social media, referring to him as the Taylor Swift of the Technology industry.

  

• As of May 2024, he owns US$86.76 million or more than 3.5% of the company’s outstanding shares.

• He was in the limelight at the computer and technology trade show, Computex 2024, in Taipei. The media termed his celebrity status as Jensanity.

  

• In 2024, he became the longest-serving CEO (31 years) of any technology company.