At nine years old, Jensen Huang, whose parents sent him to the United States to flee the Vietnam War, was enrolled in what they thought was a prestigious boarding school in Kentucky. It turned out to be a reformatory for troubled boys where Jensen and his brother were forced into physical labor. They were relentlessly bullied by fellow students, threatened with knives, and tormented over their ethnicity.
This harsh beginning only underscores the extraordinary journey that followed, leading up to the present, where Huang’s company, NVIDIA, recently announced a $500 billion plan to build a chip manufacturing facility in the United States. He recently appeared at the White House with President Trump and 19 other CEO’s detailing $8 trillion in investments as part of the plan to restore American manufacturing.
Jensen Huang was born in 1963 in Tainan, Taiwan. His father, a chemical engineer, and his mother, a schoolteacher, moved the family to Thailand when he was five. With regional conflict looming due to the Vietnam War, Huang’s parents began preparing their sons for a new life in America, teaching them ten English words a day.
After the harrowing experience in Kentucky, the family reunited and settled in Oregon, where Huang graduated from Aloha High School. He went on to earn an electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University in 1984. While studying, he met Lori Mills, who would become his wife. Huang later obtained a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford while working full-time in Silicon Valley.
In 1993, with just $40,000 in seed capital and two co-founders—Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem—Huang launched NVIDIA. The startup initially aimed to develop graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming market. It wasn’t long before the company attracted $20 million in venture capital and began gaining traction in the industry.
NVIDIA went public in 1999, and when its stock price hit $100 per share, Huang celebrated by getting a tattoo of the company’s logo. Though originally tailored for gamers, NVIDIA’s GPUs proved to be a cornerstone of the artificial intelligence revolution. Their ability to process massive datasets in parallel made them indispensable to AI researchers and developers.
Under Huang’s leadership, NVIDIA expanded into autonomous vehicles, medical research, and high-performance computing. He became one of the world's wealthiest and most influential tech CEOs. His philanthropic efforts with his wife through the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation have funded education, healthcare, and community projects.
Recognized as Fortune’s 2017 Businessperson of the Year and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2021, Huang has earned a reputation as a visionary. In 2018, he coined “Huang’s Law,” declaring that GPU performance was increasing at a rate faster than predicted by Moore’s Law, a statement he helped prove true.
From an abusive start in Kentucky to building one of the world’s most powerful tech companies, Huang’s story is a testament to resilience, foresight, and the American Dream.