Meet Nvidia cofounder Jensen Huang, whose fortune just shot up almost $9 billion

And he owes almost $9 billion of his fortune to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings bump. Huang owns about 3.5% of the Santa Clara-based chipmaker, per the company’s 2023 annual report.

The latest earnings follow the company’s blockbuster first-quarter and second-quarter results due to the generative AI boom last year.

Born as Jen-hsun Huang in Taipei in 1963, Huang spent a part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand, per Bloomberg. 

In 1973, Huang’s parents sent the kids to relatives in the US owing to the social unrest in the Southeast Asian country, before relocating there themselves.

Huang’s aunt and uncle — who were recent migrants to Washington state at the time — accidentally sent Jensen and his brother to Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, which was considered a reform school instead of a prep school, according to Huang’s 2002 interview with Wired.

“And the kids were really tough,” Huang told NPR in a 2012 interview. “They all had pocket knives — and when they get in fights, it’s not pretty. Kids get hurt.”

Students at the school also had to work, and Huang’s duty was to clean the bathrooms. 

“The ending of the story is I loved the time I was there,” Huang told NPR. “We worked really hard — we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough.”

In 2019, he and his wife Lori donated $2 million toward building a female dormitory and classroom building at the school, per the institute’s website.

Huang and his brother eventually moved to Oregon where they rejoined the family.

During his time as a high schooler in Beaverton, he was a nationally ranked junior table tennis champion, according to a 2017 profile on Oregon State University, or OSU, where Huang attended college.

Huang also holds a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. 

They have two children, according to OSU’s profile. 

“I enjoyed computers growing up, but OSU opened up my eyes to the magic behind them,” he told the university.

Huang graduated in 1984 — the “perfect year to graduate,” he said at a keynote speech at National Taiwan University’s commencement ceremony on Saturday, according to Fortune. That was the same year when the first Mac computers were released, bringing forth a new age in personal computing.

After graduating from OSU, Huang worked at chip companies LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices in a variety of roles, according to his bio on Nvidia’s website.

He founded Nvidia in 1993 after leaving LSI Logic.

Nvidia was founded in 1993 at a Denny’s restaurant where he was meeting with two friends, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, per a September 2020 report in the Wall Street Journal.

His friends were with their work at the time, and the three “wondered whether starting a graphics company would be a good idea,” Huang told Stanford University’s engineering school in a 2010 interview.

“We brainstormed and fantasized about what kind of company it would be and the world we could help. It was fun,” he told Stanford.

Denny’s was also where Huang part-timed when he was a student, per a New York Times 2010 interview. There, he learned how to be more outgoing.

“I was a very good student and I was always focused and driven. But I was very introverted. I was incredibly shy,” he told The Times. “The one experience that pulled me out of my shell was waiting tables at Denny’s. I was horrified by the prospect of having to talk to people.”

Huang is 61 years old this year — making him years older than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos when they left day-to-day operations at 52 and 57 years old, respectively.

But there are few signs he is slowing down.

“Nothing is more fun to me than to build a once-in-a-generation company with all of my friends here,” Huang told Business Insider’s Jeff Elder in April 2021 . “I can’t imagine wanting to do anything other than that.”

Updated, February 22, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect the latest details about Nvdia’s share price and Jensen Huang’s net worth.

Nvidia has made itself a key player in the AI boom by supplying hardware to major companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Demand for the company’s hardware has been driven by several factors, including a sophisticated software system that makes its chips simple to use as well as a shortage of AI chips. 

Huang now believes we’ve hit a new threshold in the AI hype cycle. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries, and nations,” Huang said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings press release.