30 Facts About Jensen Huang

Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang is a Taiwanese and American businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the president, co-founder, and chief executive officer of Nvidia, the world's largest semiconductor company.

The son of Taiwanese American immigrants, Jensen Huang spent his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand before moving to the United States, where he was a student in Kentucky and Oregon.

Jensen Huang led the company out of near-bankruptcy during the 1990s and oversaw its expansion into GPU production, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.

Under Jensen Huang, Nvidia experienced rapid growth during the AI boom and reached a market capitalization of $3 trillion, surpassing Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta.

Jensen Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17,1963, and moved to the southern city of Tainan as a child.

Jensen Huang is the younger of two sons of Huang Hsing-tai, a chemical engineer at an oil refinery, and Lo Tsai-hsiu, a schoolteacher.

When he was five years old, Jensen Huang's family moved to Thailand to support his father's refinery work and remained there for approximately four years.

When he was ten years old, Jensen Huang lived with his brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory.

In Oneida, Jensen Huang cleaned toilets every day, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14.

Jensen Huang taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press.

In 2002, Jensen Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".

Two years after Jensen Huang arrived in Oneida, his parents moved to the United States and settled in Beaverton, Oregon, where the brothers withdrew from school in Kentucky to live back with them.

Jensen Huang skipped two grades, graduated at age sixteen, and became a nationally ranked table-tennis player in addition to being a member of its mathematics, computer, and science clubs.

Jensen Huang studied electrical engineering and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1984 at age 20.

Jensen Huang later recalled, "I was the youngest kid in school, in class" and the only student who "looked like a child".

Jensen Huang had interviewed for positions at Texas Instruments, Advanced Micro Devices, and LSI Logic, ultimately choosing the California-based AMD due to already being familiar with the company.

Jensen Huang designed AMD microprocessors while simultaneously attending Stanford and raising his two children.

However, when he heard of new chip design processes at LSI Logic, Jensen Huang left AMD to assume a role as a technical officer at the LSI Corporation, working under a startup company, Sun Microsystems, where he met engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

GX was a widespread financial success; the sales of the graphics engine contributed to Sun Microsystem's revenue increasing from $262 million in 1987 to $656 million in 1990, and Jensen Huang was promoted to be the director of LSI's CoreWare, a division that manufactured chips for hardware vendors.

Jensen Huang chose for them to meet at Denny's due to his prior work experience at the restaurant chain and because it was "quieter than home and had cheap coffee".

Jensen Huang earned as CEO in 2007, ranking him as the 61st highest paid US CEO by Forbes.

Jensen Huang prefers to maintain a relatively flat management structure, with around 60 direct reports as of November 2024, based upon his view that people reporting directly to him "should be at the top of their game" and "require the least amount of pampering".

In March 2024, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram with a picture of himself and Jensen Huang wearing each other's signature jacket: "He's like Taylor Swift, but for tech".

Jensen Huang was the center of attention at Computex 2024 in Taipei, even though he was not on the official speaking program.

In January 2025, Jensen Huang delivered the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

In 2019, Jensen Huang donated $2 million to his former school, Oneida Baptist Institute, for the construction of Jensen Huang Hall, a modern facility that serves as a dormitory and classroom building for female students.

The Jensen Huang family lived in ordinary middle-class starter homes in San Jose before Nvidia went public in 1999.

Jensen Huang's mother is the youngest sister of Su's maternal grandfather, making them first cousins, once removed.

Jensen Huang speaks Taiwanese Hokkien, and has dual Taiwanese and American citizenship.

Jensen Huang is a close friend of TSMC founder Morris Chang.