Jensen Huang, the immigrant to whom Silicon Valley pays a toll for the 'golden' of AI

Earning 9.5 billion dollars in a single day is not within everyone's reach. There are few called to that table. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, is one of them. The brutal performance of his company in the last decade has not only made him one of the richest men in the world but has also triggered interest in his figure.. Many are wondering today who is the leather biker jacket executive who has installed himself at the epicenter of the industry of the moment: artificial intelligence.

Jim Cramer, the famous CNBC anchor and financial analyst, says that Huang is a once-in-a-generation visionary, a genius who has managed to go further than Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Space. “Jensen (Huang) is single-handedly creating an industrial revolution,” he said after Nvidia presented its best financial results in its history on Wednesday, with a 769% increase in net profit.

overwhelming dominance

Huang used clairvoyance to realize, before anyone else, that his microprocessors intended for graphics design could be used to train artificial intelligence systems.. Today the dominance of your company in that market segment is overwhelming. Everyone, even the big tech giants that are competing fiercely to gain a foothold in AI, has to go through Nvidia, its GPU chips, and the multi-billion dollar ecosystem it has created around it.. It has competition, such as AMD and Intel, but the difference at the moment is abysmal.

The proof is in its dizzying rise. Nvidia shares have soared 20,000% in a decade and 500% in the last 18 months. And with them, Huang's fortune, who controls 3.5% of the shares of the company he founded with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993.. He was 30 years old at the time and between the three of them they didn't even have $40,000 to start the company.. Today he is 61 years old and has a net worth of around $69 billion.

Story of improvement

His is another story of overcoming and persistence.. Huang comes from nothing, to parents who emigrated from Taiwan to Thailand in the 70s and from there to the United States. In fact, young Jen-Hsun – his original first name – emigrated with his brother to Oregon when he was only 9 years old.. His parents sent him to live with an uncle and a year later he ended up living in a kind of religious reformatory in Kentucky.

That was a miscalculation by his uncle, convinced that the center was a prestigious boarding school.. But Huang remembers it as an enriching experience.. It helped him become tougher surrounded by illiterate farmers' children and peers who constantly made fun of his Asian origin and appearance.. He was the smartest in the class and ended up gaining their sympathy.

Academic precocity

A couple of years later, his parents obtained the papers to emigrate to the United States and Huang returned to Oregon to finish high school.. He was so good at math and science that he finished it two years early, at 16, and started college as the youngest in the class.. “I looked like I was twelve years old,” he recalls in an interview with The New Yorker.

His precocity was not an impediment to conquering one of the few girls in the electrical engineering course at Oregon State University.. “There were about 250 students in the course and maybe three girls,” he recalls.. Lori Mills was seduced by his ability to pass subjects with ease.

Tattooed Nvidia

They moved to Silicon Valley, and while Huang was working for AMD—now a competitor of Nvidia—and doing a master's degree at Stanford, he came up with the idea of opening his own company.. “We believed that this computing model could solve problems that traditional computing was not capable of,” he noted in 2017.. Almost three decades later he is still talking about the same thing, a patient monopolist. “I've barely had to change my presentations.”

Today he hands out thousand-dollar tips at the same restaurant where he worked in his college days, Denny's, and has his company's logo tattooed, keeping his promise to do so if Nvidia's stock rose above $100.. Now they are close to 800, which places it as the third most valuable company in the United States and the fourth most valuable worldwide.. Only Microsoft and Apple are worth more.