Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, CEO and co-founder of tech giant Nvidia, the company that has benefited the most from the rapid growth of AI technology, is not your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Young people should experience “pain and suffering” to build their character, and parents should stop encouraging their children to necessarily learn programming – these are just two of Huang’s “advices” that have recently attracted attention and sparked a heated debate on and for social media boundaries

Some commentators have even noted that the model will be Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, known for his controversial statements in interviews and social networks.

But Reuters showed in a portrait of Huang from last May, when Nvidia’s share price surged on the US stock market amid enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI), that he has always been a special character in the constellation of Silicon entrepreneurs and executives. Valley, the “Mecca” of technology companies in the United States.

For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Nvidia to hold a massive product launch online, CEO Jensen Huang filmed himself in his kitchen taking the company’s latest chip out of the oven.

“I have something to show you,” he said as he prepared to open the oven door. “It’s been cooking for a while,” he continued before taking out a plate the size of a baking sheet. “What do we have here? This is the largest graphics card in the world,” said Juan.

Reuters notes that this is just one example of the kind of “show-off” that has turned the Taiwanese immigrant to the United States, who usually wears a leather biker jacket to product launches, into one of the biggest names in technology.

Under Huang’s leadership, Nvidia became the third most valuable company in the world

Last May, Huang joined the elite list of executives at the technology company with a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion.

Huang, 60, became only the second US CEO to achieve such success with a company he co-founded, the first being Jeff Bezos. The founder and former Amazon executive, however, stepped down as the company’s CEO in 2021.

From May 2023 to today, Nvidia’s market capitalization has exceeded two trillion dollars, making it the third most valuable company in the world.

Aside from Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the late Steve Jobs, and Huang, few founders have been so closely tied to the success of their businesses. As for Huang, he even boasts a tattoo of the Nvidia logo on one of his hands.

Nvidia chips are at the center of several major technology trends, from video game development to self-driving cars to cloud computing and now artificial intelligence.

Although the various estimates vary slightly, they all show that Nvidia has more than 80% of the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), the electronic circuits needed by AI systems to perform their complex calculations.

And Nvidia’s impressive rise over the past year and a half is synonymous with enthusiasm for AI technology, although until recently it was hardly a “poor” company.

But before the launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI that sparked huge interest in artificial intelligence technology, Nvidia’s US stock market capitalization was about $420 billion. Currently, only Microsoft and Apple are ahead of the company in this regard.

Jensen Huang is considered a star in his native Taiwan

Huang’s success is partly due to his desire to solve complex problems in computer science through a combination of software and hardware, a vision that took him 3 decades to perfect.

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved with his parents to the US as a child, later earning engineering degrees at Oregon State University and Stanford University.

Huang is hugely popular in Taiwan, the world leader in chip manufacturing, and was received like a rock star during a visit to Taipei last year to attend a tech fair where he headlined.

Huang’s speech lasted two hours, but thousands of people waited until it was over to try and take a selfie with him.

In 1993, when he was 30 years old, Huang, together with two American engineers, Curtis Prim and Chris Malachowski, founded Nvidia in the United States, and then received funding from Sequoia Capital, one of the most famous investment funds in Silicon Valley.

Nvidia’s first big success was the chips needed for video cards for video games. Nvidia released the first GPU in 1999. But at that time, Huang did not see Nvidia as just a company engaged in the production of microchips.

“Computer graphics is one of the most complex components of informatics. It is necessary to understand everything”, – he declared, including 3 years ago, when he received an award for achievements.

Huang during a recent visit to Taiwan (PHOTO: Sam Yeh / AFP / Profimedia Images)

Nvidia made a bet on artificial intelligence, it didn’t just cash in on its popularity

In the mid-2000s, Huang and his team realized that Nvidia chips could be used for more general computer science problems and launched CUDA, a software platform that allowed developers of all kinds to program Nvidia chips.

This platform became the basis for a wave of new applications of the company’s chips, including in the cryptosphere.

But the big blow for Huang came when he realized that research labs at American universities were using the company’s chips to work on artificial intelligence models, a niche in computer science that had a lot of promise, but not much. .

Then Nvidia developed a series of chips for artificial intelligence systems, and that gamble obviously paid off in a big way.

Nvidia has also differentiated itself from competitors by choosing to outsource the production of its chips to partners such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, as opposed to the model adopted by Intel, which now costs only Hwang’s share of the company.

Nvidia’s success has elevated Huang to the 20th place in the ranking of the world’s billionaires, and Bloomberg estimates his fortune at $78.8 billion.

Nvidia’s latest big announcement came this Monday, when Huang revealed that it is working on a hardware and software platform for building humanoid robots that includes generative artificial intelligence features.