Jensen Huang is an American businessman and the co-founder of Nvidia, the kingpin of chips powering artificial intelligence.
NVIDIA’s technology has the potential to transform how we live.
Biography
He was born on February 17, 1963, in Tainan, Taiwan, as Jen-Hsun Huang.
At age 5, he moved to Thailand with his family.
At age 9, he moved to the US to live with an uncle in Tacoma. The uncle there found a school for Jensen and his brother: Oneida Baptist Institute, in Clay County, Kentucky, which Fortune describes as one of poorest counties in the country in the 1970s and still today (Fortune, 2025).
About two years later his parents arrived. His mother worked as a maid, his father, a trained engineer, got hired at a consultancy.
“They left everything behind,” he said on The Joe Rogan Experience in December 2025. “They started over in their late thirties.”
As a teenager in Oregon, Huang got a job at Denny’s. He started on dishes and ended up as a waiter. He calls the chain his “alma mater,” and at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2024 he went further: “I was probably Denny’s best dish washer […] I washed the living daylights out of the dishes.” (Business Insider, 2024)
A Denny’s near San Jose is also where he met Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993 to plan a graphics chip company.
Fortune called that restaurant his version of the Steve Jobs garage.
In 1984, Huang graduated from Oregon State University, where he studied electrical engineering. About 8 years later, he got his master’s degree in electrical engineering.
Jen-Hsun Huang, the fiercely competitive CEO of Nvidia – 2003 – @Getty
Nvidia
In 1993, Huang co-founded Nvidia with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. He was 30 at the time.
They founded Nvidia with $40k. The company got its start as a provider of graphics cards for computer gamers.
He has served as the CEO since founding the company in 1993. Previously, he worked for LSI Logic and AMD.
In January 1999, Nvidia went public.
Nvidia introduced CUDA in 2006 (software that lets its graphics chips run general math, and the base layer most AI developers use now).
“When I launched CUDA, the audience was complete silence,” Huang said on Joe Rogan’s show in December 2025. “Nobody wanted it. Nobody asked for it. Nobody understood it.”
Ten years on, same silence. The DGX-1, Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer, got zero purchase orders at launch, and the one inquiry came from Elon Musk, who said he ran “a nonprofit AI lab.” His reaction, as he put it on the podcast: “a nonprofit is not buying a $300,000 computer.”
Musk insisted.
So in 2016 Huang boxed up one of the first units, drove it to San Francisco himself and left it in a small upstairs office where Ilya Sutskever and Pieter Abbeel worked, a room that became OpenAI.
In 2010, Audi started to use Nvidia GPUs to power the infotainment and navigation systems.
Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer NVIDIA Corporation, poses at outdoor location in Mumbai, India – 2009 – @Getty
In September 2021, Huang made the Time 100 List of Influential People. He’s also a recipient of the IEEE Founder’s Medal.
In March 2024, Haung said that Nvidia’s GPUs are “so good that even when the competitor’s chips are free, it’s not cheap enough.”
One Wall Street analyst commented, “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer.”
Wife
Jensen Huang is married to Lori Huang (née Mills). She is his electrical engineering lab partner from OSU.
Both are Oregon State University graduates. It is there where they first met. He was 17 years old, and she was 19.
Jensen and Lori have a $1 billion foundation.
In 2022, Huang and his wife donated $50 million to the OSU Foundation to help build an education and research center.
Jen-Hsun Huang with his family – @Getty
November 2026
Nvidia’s board announced an independent investigation into reports that Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort,” and said it had “no reason to believe” national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.
The reports started with The New York Times on October 29, 2026. Per AP’s summary of that story, U.S. intelligence agencies found Huang had a close relationship with Alice Huang (no relation).
Huang told the board he had been intimate with her. In a letter to employees obtained by AP, he wrote that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologized to his family.
“Leading Nvidia is the privilege of my life,” he wrote. “My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility.”
He remains CEO while the review runs, and Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo told AP: “Today’s news will not slow Nvidia.”
Children
The Huangs have two children — son Spencer, who works as a product manager at Nvidia, and daughter Madison, who is also a product manager at Nvidia. Madison has an MBA from London Business School.
Interesting facts
He wears a signature rock-star-style leather jacket almost every day. It was inspired by Steve Jobs, who wore a black turtleneck sweater regularly.
Huang and Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, are related. Su said that they are “distant relatives, so some complex second cousin type of thing.”
Jensen Huang, President of NVIDIA at supermicro keynote during the COMPUTEX 2023 – @Getty
Jensen Huang – Net Worth
So, how much is Jensen Huang worth? Huang earned his wealth from co-founding and managing Nvidia. He owns 3.5% of the company. Therefore, Jensen Huang has an estimated net worth of $162 billion.
On August 27, 2026, the day after Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, Forbes calculated his fortune at $196.8 billion, sixth in the world.
In February 2023, his net worth was at $21.8 billion, while in 2019 it was at $4 billion.
In February 2024, it was reported that Nvidia’s revenue was $60.9 billion in the fiscal year. For the year 2023, turnover reached more than $60 billion.
Jensen Huang arrives for the Inaugural AI Insight Forum in Russell Building on Capitol Hill – @Getty
On February 22, 2024, Nvidia passed Google for the third most valuable in the world. “There is nothing out of the ordinary with Nvidia’s valuation or recent gains,” Jensen said.
Companies such as Alphabet, Volvo, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Meta, and Amazon are Nvidia’s largest customers.
Apparently, he’s not having much fun right now since in 2010 he said that the most fun part of any business venture or game is “when you’re losing.”
NVIDIA is currently the most valuable company in the world. NVIDIA had a market cap of $4.5 trillion in April 2026. Forbes puts his stake at 3% of the company (Forbes, May 2026).
After the August 2026 report it reached near $5.52 trillion. By November 9, 2026, it was down near $4.6 trillion.
Real estate
In 2017, Huang bought a mansion on San Francisco’s Gold Coast for $38 million. Huang also owns a seven-bedroom home on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
In 2003, he and his wife purchased a property in Los Altos Hills for $6.9 million.
year by year
| Year | Estimated net worth | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $4.7 billion | Before ChatGPT launch |
| 2021 | $11.8 billion | Stock climbs, pre-AI boom |
| 2022 | $20.6 billion | No. 78 on Forbes list |
| 2023 | $21.1 billion | ChatGPT chip demand starts |
| 2024 | $77 billion | Third-biggest gain on list |
| 2025 | $98.7 billion | No. 16, March 7 prices |
| March 2026 | $154 billion | No. 8 worldwide |
| May 2026 | $191.5 billion | Passes Michael Dell |
| August 2026 | $196.8 billion | Blowout quarter, No. 6 |
| November 2026 | $154.4 billion | Selloff, board investigation |
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I am Bulgarea Candin Stefan, and I founded FamousPeopleToday.com in 2018. I’m using my bachelor’s degree in economics and 9 years of experience in blogging to guide millions of people through the incredibly complex world of celebrity net worths.