Jensen Huang

Huang was born in Taiwan, sent to a boarding school in Kentucky at nine that turned out to be a reform school, washed dishes at Denny's as a teenager, and was designing chips at LSI Logic and AMD before he was thirty. Nvidia was founded over breakfast at a Denny's in San Jose in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, two Sun Microsystems engineers, on the bet that 3D graphics for games would need dedicated silicon. Roughly thirty other companies made the same bet. Nvidia's first product failed — it rendered curves when the industry standardised on triangles — and Huang laid off half the company and staked what remained on a single chip, tested in software emulation because there was no money for prototypes. He has been telling employees the company is thirty days from going out of business ever since, including in years when it was worth more than any company on earth.

His defining decision came in 2006, when Nvidia was a successful graphics company with about $3 billion of revenue and no reason to change. He committed to making every GPU programmable for general-purpose computing — CUDA — which added cost to every consumer chip for a feature gamers did not want, and served a market of scientists and researchers that could not yet pay for it. The stock fell, the analysts objected, and he funded it through the financial crisis and a costly defective-chip episode. When deep learning arrived in 2012, it arrived on Nvidia hardware because there was nowhere else for it to run. He then spent the next decade building for a customer that did not exist, personally delivering the first DGX supercomputer to OpenAI in 2016.

The contested parts are fewer than for most founders of his size, and should still be stated. In 2022 Nvidia paid $5.5 million to settle SEC charges that it had failed to disclose how much of its gaming revenue in 2018 came from cryptocurrency mining — a demand that then collapsed and left the company holding inventory. His management style is total: around sixty direct reports, no one-to-one meetings, public dressing-downs that he defends as 'refining' people, and a company that has no visible succession plan for a founder now in his sixties. He is, more than any chief executive of a company this large, the single point of failure. And Nvidia's largest export market has been closed and reopened by two governments since 2022, a dispute in which he has negotiated personally and in which the company's interest and the interest of its home country's policy have not always aligned.