Having merged since yesterday into a closed club of companies with a capitalization of more than a trillion. dollars, Nvidia is now considered the new American tech giant. The self-proclaimed “global leader in artificial intelligence computing” is capitalizing on the AI ​​investment frenzy and ranking alongside the biggest names in the tech industry like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Her rise was swift. Over the past 10 years, Nvidia stock has risen more than 10,000%, the best performance of any S&P 500 company in that period. Over $940 billion in capitalized wealth was created during this rally. So, just last week, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang saw his personal fortune increase by nearly $7 billion, approaching $35 billion. Born in Taiwan and raised in the US, Huang owns 86.9 million Nvidia shares, or 3.5% of the company. He has become $21.1 billion richer since the start of the year, making him the 37th richest person in the world today.

Juan turned 60 this year and in 2010 got a tattoo of the Nvidia logo on his arm. He was born in Taipei in 1963 and spent part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand until his parents sent him and his siblings to stay with relatives in the US in 1973 due to social unrest in their country.

In fact, his uncles mistakenly enrolled him in a reform school in the US. “The kids were very hard. Everyone had knives and they fought. It was unpleasant. Children were injured,” he said in an interview in 2012. All the students in the school had to work, and one of his duties was to clean the toilets. “The end of the story is that I enjoyed spending time there,” he later said. In fact, in 2019 he donated $2 million to build classrooms and dorms in the school building.

Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is $21.1 billion richer since the start of the year.

Juan attended Oregon State University while earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. In fact, during his studies, he met his future wife in the laboratory. “Growing up I loved computers, but OSU opened my eyes to the magic behind them,” he said.

He graduated in 1984, which he said was “the perfect year to graduate”. That same year, the first Mac computers were released, ushering in a new era in computing.

Huang worked at semiconductor companies LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices and founded Nvidia in 1993 when he left LSI Logic. He was with two friends, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Prime, at Denny’s when they “wondered if it would be a good idea to start a graphics company.” “We came up with ideas and imagined what kind of company it would be and how many people we could help. It was fun,” he later said in his Stanford speech.

Today he is 60 years old, much older than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were when they stopped running the companies they founded, at 52 and 57, respectively. But he doesn’t seem ready to retire now that the AI ​​”wave” is bringing his company to the forefront of technological developments. “There is nothing more fun for me than building a once-in-a-generation company with all my friends. I can’t imagine wanting to do anything other than this,” he said in 2021.