From washing dishes at Denny’s to rockstar of AI: the rise and fall of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang

Detailed summary

Technical expertise and an ability to engage gave the chipmaker’s co-founder, who has now resigned, the edge with customers and investorsJensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO after…

Technical expertise and an ability to engage gave the chipmaker’s co-founder, who has now resigned, the edge with customers and investors

Jensen Huang wasn’t always in his trademark leather jacket. When the multibillionaire, now former Nvidia chief executive was a teenager in the US, his first job was waiting tables and washing dishes at a branch of Denny’s.

“It teaches you humility, it teaches you hard work, it teaches you hospitality,” he said in 2023 of his time at the diner chain.

Decades later, having become one of the richest people on the planet, Huang put on a Denny’s apron in tribute to his former employer at an Nvidia event in 2025.

By this point Huang had become a rockstar of the artificial intelligence boom – befitting his signature item of clothing – feted around the world by investors, fellow tech executives and politicians.

The company that Huang co-founded makes the computer chips that are integral to the development and operation of AI systems such as ChatGPT.

Demand for Nvidia’s products has surged as hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into a technology that, according to its many promotors, will transform the global economy. The crude analogy is that Huang and Nvidia have become the main purveyors of shovels in the AI gold rush.

In technical jargon, its AI chips are known as graphics processor units (GPUs), which were originally designed to handle the graphics for video games. But it turned out that a GPU’s ability to carry out masses of technical calculations simultaneously and quickly is very handy for developing and operating AI systems, which have a voracious appetite for data crunching.

Nvidia is also very good at creating networks of its chips, which produces the computing power artificial intelligence needs, and provides the CUDA software that helps the company’s GPUs perform so well for AI customers.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Guardian Business. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.