Jensen Huang: The billionaire who was called by Trump himself and invited to visit China

 

Jensen Huang: The billionaire who was called by Trump himself and invited to visit China

 

US President Donald Trump has brought a host of technology industry leaders and business leaders with him on his trip to China.

They include Apple's Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX's Elon Musk, and the head of semiconductor chip maker Nvidia, Jensen Huang.

A White House official familiar with the plans told the BBC that more than a dozen US business leaders are joining Trump on the trip.

The trip is seen as important for the US as President Trump meets with President Xi Jinping at a time of rising economic and technological tensions between the two countries.

Huang's late inclusion in the group is notable because Nvidia's cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips have become a key player in the US-China competition.

Huang is also a member of President Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where other business leaders include Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Oracle's Larry Ellison.

‘Huang was not on the initial list

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The initial list did not include Nvidia chief Jensen Huang. However, in an unexpected development, Huang boarded Air Force One bound for Beijing when the plane stopped for fuel in Anchorage, Alaska.

A spokesperson for Nvidia told the BBC that Jensen was attending the meeting at the invitation of President Trump to support the US and the administration’s goals.

Jensen Huang: The man who washed toilets and dishes before becoming the head of technology company Nvidia

Nvidia was founded by Jensen Huang in 1993. Since the company started making graphics cards for computers, the company's name combines three elements. NV, next vision, refers to the dream of the future, VID, video: while the word is taken from 'invidia', a Latin word meaning to compete.

Given the amazing results of this technology company during 2023, it is likely that this is indeed the feeling that both the company and its founder will awaken in their competitors.

Between March 2023 and March 2024, Nvidia's share price increased from 264 US dollars to 886 US dollars, bringing its total value to more than two trillion US dollars.

And it has become the world's third-largest public company, surpassing Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta. Only Microsoft and Apple are now ahead of it on the list.

Nvidia's rapid rise in value is explained by artificial intelligence and the fact that it is the company that supplies more than 70% of the chips that make this technology possible.

But this technology would not have existed if it had not been for the vision of its founder, Jensen Huang. He chose a market when it did not exist and played his part in turning it into a reality.

As Wired magazine recently wrote, Huang is today considered the "man of the hour, the year and perhaps the decade".

While Jim Cramer, investment analyst for the American network CNBC, has said that the Nvidia founder has surpassed Elon Musk in terms of vision for the future.

Huang's story has not been without difficulties, risks and hard work. The story also includes scrubbing toilets and working long hours as a waiter.

An immigrant child in a reformatory

He was born in 1963 in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Huang spent part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand before his parents decided to send him and his brother to the United States.

The brothers, who did not speak English, went to live with their uncles, who had also recently arrived in the country. They were sent to Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky to study, a place that resembled a reformatory more than a school.

According to a newsletter published by the school in 2016, the brothers were allowed to live, eat and work at the institution while they were studying at Oneida Elementary School.

Young Jensen’s job was to clean the toilets.

“The kids were really tough,” he said in a 2012 interview with NPR. “They all had knives in their pockets, and when there was a fight, it was not a good scene. The kids got hurt.”

Despite the hardships, Huang has always maintained that it was a great experience and that he enjoyed his time there.

In 2016, Huang and his wife, Lori, donated $2 million to build a girls’ classroom and dormitory building at the educational center.

Gambling on the unknown

Huang graduated as an engineer in 1984. He says that year was “a great year to graduate” because it was the year the era of personal computers began with the release of the first Mac.

He then went on to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, which took him eight years to complete.

Along with his studies, he worked in various capacities at technology companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and LSI Logic, which he left shortly before founding Nvidia.

He said in a 2013 talk at Oregon State University that before starting the company, the three founders asked themselves three questions: Is this something we “really would love to do? Is it worth doing?” And is this work ‘really hard’ to do?’

He said, ‘I ask myself the same three questions all the time today. Because you shouldn’t do anything you don’t love and you should only work on the things in your life that are important.’

Part of his work philosophy is to do these important things even when there is no clear market for them.

He said at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, ‘We are motivated not by the size of the market but by the importance of the work, because the importance of the work is an early indicator of the future market.’

There he also advised constantly returning to the fundamentals, which he assured was what creates the most opportunities.

,Image captionNvidia achieved its early market success with graphics chips that revolutionized the world of video games

By implementing this kind of thinking, Huang has built a balanced company that not only has more than 40 people reporting to him directly, but also in which he encourages everyone in the company through two-way communication.

As he explained, it is also a way to facilitate the flow of ideas and information and to keep his team informed with the best ideas.

“Leading people to achieve great things, inspiring others, empowering and helping them, these are the reasons why a great team exists and that serves everyone who works in the company,” he added in his talk at Stanford.

And judging by Nvidia’s results, it is a philosophy that works. But it is not as if the company has never had bad times.

The first of these events occurred very quickly when, during its first two years, the price of DRAM memory fell by 90% after finding a technical solution to overcome the high cost of the memory.

This made the investment effort futile and opened the door for dozens of other companies to participate in the race to produce the best graphics chips.

Nvidia was able to reorient its efforts and in 1999 launched the graphics processing unit (GPU), a type of microprocessor that redefined computer games.

From there, the company continued to work on the development of GPU-accelerated computing. This is a computing model that makes extensive use of parallel graphics processors and that speeds up the work of programs that require large computational power. Such as analysis, data, simulation, visualization and artificial intelligence.

Nvidia’s share price has skyrocketed, pushing Huang’s personal fortune to $79 billion, making him the 18th richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine.

And it could go even further thanks to Nvidia’s quasi-monopoly position in the production of superchips, the demand for which is only expected to grow in the near future.

As one Wall Street analyst wrote in The New Yorker magazine, “The war in artificial intelligence is on, and Nvidia is the only vendor of the devices.”

It seems that fortune will continue to be kind to Jensen Huang.