Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang (born 1963) co-founded Nvidia in 1993 — legendarily over breakfast at a Denny’s — and has run it ever since, making him one of the longest-serving CEOs in tech. Born in Taiwan and raised partly in rural Kentucky, he bet the company early on graphics processors, then bet it again on CUDA, the software layer that turned GPUs into general-purpose computers. When deep learning arrived, Nvidia owned the only picks and shovels in town.

The arms dealer of the AI boom

ChatGPT’s 2022 debut turned Nvidia from a chip company into the infrastructure of an era. Its data-center GPUs became the world’s scarcest strategic resource, and Nvidia became the first company to cross a $4 trillion market capitalization in July 2025. Huang, in his trademark leather jacket, became the boom’s itinerant preacher — keynoting Computex, CES, and GTC with the message that AI is a new industrial revolution and that every nation needs “AI factories.”

His signature argument is about access, not power: because AI understands plain language, the technology divide closes rather than widens. At London Tech Week in June 2025 he noted that only a sliver of humanity ever learned C++ or Python, but “everybody knows human” — in the AI era, everyone is a programmer. Critics counter that the equalizer’s profits are remarkably concentrated in one company, and that export controls have made Huang an unusually consequential geopolitical actor. He remains the boom’s most unshakable optimist — every job, he argues, will be changed by AI, and most will be made better.