Jensen Huang facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Jensen Huang
黃仁勳
Huang in 2023
Born	Huang Jen-hsun (1963-02-17) February 17, 1963 (age 62) Taipei, Taiwan
Citizenship	United States Taiwan
Education	Oregon State University (BS) Stanford University (MS)
Occupation	Businessman electrical engineer philanthropist
Known for	Co-founding Nvidia
Title	President and CEO of Nvidia Corporation (1993–present)
Spouse(s)	Lori Huang ​ (m. 1985)​
Children	2
Relatives	Lisa Su (cousin)
Awards	IEEE Founders Medal (2020) VinFuture Prize (2024) Edison Award (2024) Primetime Engineering Award (2024) Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2025)
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	黃仁勳
Simplified Chinese	黄仁勋
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Huáng Rénxūn Bopomofo ㄏㄨㄤˊ ㄖㄣˊㄒㄩㄣ Gwoyeu Romatzyh Hwang Renshiun Wade–Giles Huang2 Jen2-hsün1 IPA [xu̯ǎŋ ɻə̌n.ɕýn] Yue: Cantonese Jyutping Wong4 Jan4-fan1 Southern Min Hokkien POJ N̂g Jîn-hun Tâi-lô N̂g Jîn-hun
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Jensen Huang (born February 17, 1963) is a famous Taiwanese and American businessman. He is an electrical engineer and also a philanthropist, which means he gives money to good causes. Jensen Huang is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia. Nvidia is one of the world's biggest companies that makes semiconductors, which are tiny parts used in electronics.

Huang's family moved from Taiwan to the United States when he was young. He lived in different places like Kentucky and Oregon. After finishing his studies at Stanford University, he started Nvidia in 1993. He was 30 years old at the time. He has been the leader of Nvidia ever since.

He helped Nvidia grow a lot, especially in making GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). These are special computer chips that help with graphics and are now very important for artificial intelligence (AI). Under his leadership, Nvidia became the first company to be worth over $4.0 trillion in July 2025. Time magazine has named him one of the most influential people in the world multiple times.

Early Life and Education

Jensen Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1963. When he was a child, his family moved to Tainan, another city in Taiwan. His father was a chemical engineer, and his mother was a schoolteacher. They were a middle-class family and moved often. Jensen's mother helped him and his brother learn English by teaching them ten new words from the dictionary every day.

When Jensen was five, his family moved to Thailand for about four years because of his father's work. He went to the Ruamrudee International School in Bangkok. In the late 1960s, his father decided to send Jensen and his brother to the United States for a better education.

Moving to the United States

At age nine, Jensen was sent to the US even though he couldn't speak English well. In 1973, he and his older brother moved to Tacoma, Washington, to live with an uncle. His aunt and uncle, who were new to Washington, accidentally enrolled them in the Oneida Baptist Institute. This was a religious school in Kentucky for troubled youth, but they thought it was a fancy boarding school. To pay for the school, Jensen's parents sold almost everything they owned.

When he was ten, Jensen lived in the boys' dormitory at Oneida. All students had to work daily. His older brother worked on a tobacco farm. Jensen was too young for the reform academy's classes, so he went to a public school nearby. He was often bullied because he was small and had a strong accent. In Oneida, he cleaned toilets every day. He also learned to play table tennis and joined the swimming team. He even appeared in Sports Illustrated when he was 14. He taught his roommate, who couldn't read, how to read. In return, his roommate taught him how to bench press. Jensen remembers his time in Kentucky very clearly.

High School and First Job

Two years later, Jensen's parents moved to the United States and settled in Beaverton, Oregon. Jensen and his brother left the school in Kentucky to live with them. As a teenager, Jensen went to Aloha High School in Aloha, Oregon. He was a very good student and skipped two grades, graduating at age sixteen. He was also a nationally ranked table-tennis player. He was part of the math, computer, and science clubs.

From age 15 to 20 (1978-1983), Jensen had his first job. He worked the night shift at a local Denny's restaurant. He was a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter.

College and Graduate School

After high school, Jensen chose to go to Oregon State University. He picked it because the tuition was affordable for students from Oregon. He studied electrical engineering and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1984 when he was 20. He said he was the youngest student in his classes. Years later, while working as a microchip designer, he took night classes at Stanford University. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1992.

Early Career in Tech

After college, Jensen Huang worked as a microchip designer in Silicon Valley. He worked for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), designing microprocessors. While working there, he also attended Stanford and raised his two children. Later, he moved to LSI Logic, a company that made chips for hardware companies.

At LSI Logic, he met two engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. They were working on a new type of graphics accelerator card. This card helps computers display images and videos smoothly. Together, they created a successful graphics engine called "GX." The GX engine helped Sun Microsystems, a company LSI worked with, earn a lot more money. Jensen was then promoted to lead a division at LSI that made chips for other companies.

Founding Nvidia

Huang founded Nvidia Corporation after meeting with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in a Denny's diner in East San Jose (pictured). As a teenager, Huang was previously an employee at a Denny's restaurant in Oregon.

After 1990, business slowed down for Sun Microsystems. Jensen, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem decided to leave their jobs. They wanted to start their own company to make special graphics chips for PC games.

The Name and the Meeting Place

They first thought of naming their company "NVision." But Jensen suggested "Nvidia," which comes from the Latin word invidia. This word means "envy," and Priem wanted competitors to be "green with envy" over their products.

The three often met in 1992 at a Denny's restaurant in East San Jose to plan their business. Jensen chose Denny's because he had worked there before. He also found it quieter than home and it had cheap coffee. They officially founded the company during one of these breakfast meetings.

Starting the Company

To make the company official, Jensen found a lawyer. The lawyer asked for $200 in cash to start the company. Jensen then asked Chris and Curtis for $200 each for their share. So, Nvidia started with just $600! On April 5, 1993, Jensen Huang officially signed the papers to create Nvidia.

Even though he left LSI, Jensen stayed on good terms with his old company. He was able to get funding for Nvidia from LSI's CEO, Wilfred Corrigan. Corrigan introduced Jensen to a venture capitalist named Don Valentine. Valentine's company, Sequoia Capital, decided to invest in Nvidia. This money helped Nvidia start developing its first chip and pay its employees.

From the very first day, Jensen Huang became Nvidia's president and CEO. He was 30 years old, younger than Chris and Curtis. But both of them believed he was ready to lead. They told him, "you're in charge of running the company—all the stuff Chris and I don’t know how to do."

Leading Nvidia

Jensen Huang has been Nvidia's CEO for over 30 years, which is a very long time in the fast-paced tech world. He owns a part of Nvidia's stock, which became public in 1999.

Overcoming Challenges

Jensen says that starting Nvidia was much harder than they expected. They faced many challenges. For their first graphics chips, Nvidia tried a different way of drawing images than their competitors. This almost caused the company to fail. Nvidia was saved when Sega invested $5 million. By the time their successful chip, the RIVA 128, was released in 1997, Nvidia had only enough money left for one more month of payroll.

This led to their unofficial company motto: "Our company is thirty days from going out of business." Jensen used to start presentations to his staff with these words for many years. He believes that the difficulties in Nvidia's early years helped him become a better leader.

Leadership Style

Jensen Huang doesn't have a fixed office at Nvidia. He moves around the headquarters and works in different conference rooms. He likes to have a flat management structure, meaning many people report directly to him. He believes these people are highly skilled and need less supervision. He also doesn't wear a watch, saying, "now is the most important time."

Growing Fame

For a long time, Jensen Huang and Nvidia were mainly known by gamers and computer graphics experts. But during the recent AI boom, Nvidia's value grew very quickly. Jensen's personal wealth also increased a lot. He became much more widely known. In March 2024, Mark Zuckerberg even compared him to Taylor Swift, but for tech!

Huang meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023

In June 2024, Nvidia's market value reached $3 trillion for the first time. Jensen's wealth grew to $100 billion. News media in Taiwan started calling his celebrity status "Jensanity," comparing it to the "Linsanity" craze around basketball player Jeremy Lin. When Jensen visited Taiwan in 2024, huge crowds of fans and reporters followed him and his family everywhere.

He gave a big speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2025. He announced new gaming chips and chips for PCs and laptops. In May 2025, he visited Taiwan again for Computex 2025, a big tech event. The "Jensanity" continued, with fans and reporters surrounding him.

Giving Back: Philanthropy

Jensen Huang believes in giving back to the community.

• In 2008, Nvidia helped fund a classroom in China for students affected by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. The students gave Jensen a red scarf to show their thanks, and he gave them kaleidoscopes.
• Jensen also donated $30 million to his former university, Stanford University. This money helped build the Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center.
• In 2019, he gave $2 million to his old school, Oneida Baptist Institute. This helped build Huang Hall, a modern dormitory and classroom building for girls.
• In 2022, Jensen donated $50 million to his other alma mater, Oregon State University. This was part of a larger $200 million gift to create a special supercomputing institute on the university campus.

Awards and Recognition

Jensen Huang at SC18

Jensen Huang has received many awards for his work and leadership:

• 1999: Named "Entrepreneur of the Year" in High Technology.
• 2004: Received an award for his contributions to the semiconductor industry.
• 2009: Received an honorary doctorate degree from Oregon State University.
• 2018: Listed among the top 50 influencers in "edge computing."
• 2019: Named the best-performing CEO in the world by the Harvard Business Review.
• 2020: Awarded the IEEE Founders Medal.
• 2021 and 2024: Included in the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people.
• 2023: Named "best CEO of 2023" by The Economist.
• 2024: Elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his work on graphics processing units and AI.
• 2024: Received the Edison Award for his leadership in AI.
• 2024: Received the grand prize of the VinFuture Prize for his work on neural networks and deep learning.
• 2025: Awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

Personal Life

Jensen Huang met his wife, Lori Mills, at Oregon State University. She was his lab partner in engineering class. They got married in 1985 and have two children, Spencer and Madison.

Their son, Spencer Huang, started a bar in Taipei in 2015 that was recognized as one of Asia's top 50 bars. The bar closed in 2021, and Spencer now works as a product manager at Nvidia. Their daughter, Madison Huang, used to work in hotels and is now a director of product marketing at Nvidia.

The Huang family lived in regular homes in San Jose before Nvidia became a public company in 1999. Later, they moved to a larger house in Los Altos Hills, California, and also bought a second home in Wailea, Hawaii. In 2017, a company linked to the Huangs bought a large house in San Francisco.

Jensen Huang is related to Lisa Su, who is the CEO of AMD, another big tech company. His mother is the youngest sister of Lisa Su's maternal grandfather. This makes them first cousins, once removed. Jensen also speaks Taiwanese Hokkien and has dual citizenship in Taiwan and the United States. He often visits Taiwan.

Jensen Huang is also good friends with Charles Liang, who co-founded Supermicro. Both their companies started in 1993 and have worked together on products. Jensen is also close friends with TSMC founder Morris Chang.

Images for kids

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  Jensen Huang in Taipei

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  Huang speaking with Josep Borrell in 2024

See also

In Spanish: Jen-Hsun Huang para niños