- Nvidia recently became the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Apple
- The chip manufacturing company is headed by Taiwanese-born American Jensen Huang
- Huang has been Nvidia’s CEO and president since its inception and has led the company to over $3 trillion capitalisation
Nvidia recently surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable company with a market valuation of $3.53 trillion ahead of Apple’s $3.52 trillion.
Worth $3.53 trillion, Nvidia currently leads the world’s three-trillion-dollar-worth companies, including Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
The feat is driven by increased demand for Nvidia’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips and a $6.6 billion funding round from Open AI, owners of ChatGPT, whose language models are trained by Nvidia’s Graphic Processing Units (GPUs).
The company’s shares surged to an all-time high recently, propelled by financial results from the world’s largest contract chipmaker, TSMC, resulting in a 54 per cent growth in profit amid rising demand for AI chips.
Behind the strides recorded by Nvidia is 61-year-old Jensen Huang, who founded the company in 1993 and has served as its president, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors since its inception.
Who is Jensen Huang?
Huang is a Taiwanese-born American entrepreneur and is the second son of two Taiwanese citizens, Huang Hsing-tai and Lo Tsai-hsiu. Huang was born on February 17, 1963, to a chemical engineer father and a grade school teacher mother.
Early life
When Huang was just five years old, the family moved to Thailand, but due to the then-ongoing Vietnam War, his parents decided against settling permanently in Thailand. To prepare them for their eventual move to the United States of America (USA), Huang’s mother taught him and his brother 10 random English words daily.
At age nine, Huang and his brother went to live with their uncle in Tacoma, Washington, while their parents stayed in Thailand.
Education
Upon arriving in the US, Huang’s uncle sent him and his brother to the all-boys Oneida Baptist Institute in rural Oneida, Kentucky, a religious reform school that Huang mistook for a boarding school.
While at Oneida, Huang was forced to clean toilets every day while his brother worked on a tobacco farm. They would face bullying from fellow students and called ethnic slurs.
Huang’s parents arrived in the United States two years later and pulled them out of Oneida. The family settled in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. There, Huang attended Aloha High School and played competitive tennis, earning a national ranking while at it.
After graduating from Aloha High School in 1981, Huang attended Oregon State University, where he graduated in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
He also has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Career
Huang started his career in Silicon Valley, where he worked with Advanced Micro Devices and then moved to LSI Logic Corporation a year later. Huang rose through the ranks at LSI to become director of the company’s division.
In April 1993, Huang, alongside fellow microchip designers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, founded Nvidia with only $40,000 in capital between them and later raised $20 million from venture capital firms.
The trio aimed to create a GPU for the video game industry. With increased funding, the company gained footing in the semiconductor market and went public in 1999.
In an interview with Fortune in 2017, Huang said its GPUs were created to solve problems that general-purpose computing couldn’t.
He said, “We believed this model of computing could solve problems that general-purpose computing fundamentally couldn’t.
“We also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don’t happen very often. Video games were our killer app—a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems.”
The company has grown beyond the gaming industry, becoming one of the leading companies in Artificial Intelligence (AI), mobile computing, autonomous vehicle technology and social networking.
Nvidia’s GPUs are credited to have powered the AI revolution as its chips have been discovered to be viable for running machine learning algorithms.
Net worth and recognition
With the growth and fortunes of Nvidia, Huang’s wealth followed a similar trajectory. Huang owns 3.5 per cent of Nvidia’s stock and is regarded as one of the highest-paid CEOs in the US.
Huang is currently one of the world’s 10 richest men and is worth over $100 billion.
Huang has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is a recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s highest honour, the Robert N. Noyce Award; the IEEE Founder’s Medal; the Dr Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University and Oregon State University.
Fortune, the Economist, and Brand Finance have named him the world’s best CEO and TIME magazine has named him one of its 100 most influential people.
Nvidia has been making giant strides
On June 18, 2024, Nvidia reached $3.334 trillion, becoming the most valuable company in the S&P 500 after crossing the $1 trillion mark in 2023.
The company’s investment in chips or semiconductors used to power many AI applications has boosted its revenue.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, Nvidia recorded $22.1 billion in revenue, which was $1.7 billion of projected revenue.
For the year ended March 31, 2024, Nvidia’s revenue reached $60.9 billion, a 126 per cent increase from the previous year.
Nvidia also recorded a 681 per cent growth in its operating income to $33 billion, which represents an operating margin of 54.2 per cent.
The company’s financial performance in the fiscal year was driven by a 217 per cent growth in its data centre revenue. It also recorded $47.5 billion in sales of GPUs and InfiniBand used in data centres.
TikTok’s founder, Zhang Yiming, is China’s richest person
Meanwhile, TheRadar reported that the 41-year-old founder of TikTok and the co-founder of ByteDance, the app’s parent company, Zhang Yiming, has become China’s richest man.
Zhang is now worth $49.3 billion (£38 billion), a 43 per cent increase to his worth in 2023, according to a rich list produced by the Hurun Research Institute.
