Week 24-25: Another week about Nvidia
Riding on the coattails of Nvidia’s stock split, here is another week covering this 31-year-old company, and this time it’s about Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the chip powerhouse whose value just surged past $3tn (£2.3tn), briefly overtaking Apple as the world's second-most valuable company, before pulling back.
About Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang is the co-founder, president and CEO of Nvidia. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 at age 30.
As of June 2024, Nvidia became the 2nd largest company in the world by market capitalization. and Huang's estimated net worth reached $116 billion, making him the 11th richest person in the world.
Dubbed by the Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg as the “Taylor Swift, but for tech”, Huang is at the forefront of a technology boom, and his rise has coincided with Nvidia's emergence as the leading designer of AI chips.
Huang was born in Taiwan and moved to Thailand as a child, but his family sent him and his brother to the U.S. as civil unrest mounted in the Asian nation.
When Nvidia started in 1993, Huang, along with co-founders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, began with the idea of creating chips that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers—or graphic processing units, specifically for video games.
Eventually, it changed focus to AI, a field it now dominates.
Interest in AI skyrocketed after the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, which was trained using 10,000 of Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), clustered together in a supercomputer.
Special mention: ‘Jensanity’ - a term to describe Huang’s sky-high popularity, especially in Taiwan, his home island.