Jensen Huang: The man in the leather jacket who built Nvidia's $5 trillion AI empire

Résumé détaillé

Huang's philosophy of success is shaped by his early years. Speaking at Stanford in 2024, he said one of his great advantages was having very low expectations. People with high expectations, he argued, tend to have low resilience.

It is a Sunday night in May at Taipei's Raohe Street Night Market, and a crowd has gathered around a grilled corn stall. The man at the centre of it is wearing a black leather jacket. The queue is long, so he makes the vendor an offer: he will pay for everyone in line if he can skip ahead.

The man is Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, and one of the richest people in the world. In Taiwan, where he was born, crowds follow him from restaurant to restaurant. Fans have a name for it: "Jensanity".

Jen-Hsun Huang was born in Taipei on February 17, 1963. His family later moved to Thailand, where his father worked at an oil refinery. His mother, determined that her sons learn English, picked 10 random words from the dictionary for them to learn each day.

When Huang was 9, political unrest in Thailand led his parents to send him and his older brother to relatives in Washington state. Those relatives sent the boys to the Oneida Baptist Institute, a boarding school in rural Kentucky. Huang did not yet speak English fluently. He was the youngest student in his class and did cleaning chores at the school.

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Decades later, speaking to Stanford students, he put it plainly: he had cleaned more toilets than all of them combined.

His parents eventually joined their sons in the US and settled in Oregon. As a teenager, Huang worked at Denny's, an American diner chain, washing dishes, bussing tables and waiting.

At 17, Huang enrolled at Oregon State University to study electrical engineering. In his lab class, he noticed a 19-year-old student named Lori Mills.

He has told the story many times. Knowing he looked young, he hoped she would assume he was smart. He walked up to her and asked if she wanted to see his homework, and promised that if they studied together every Sunday, she would get straight As.

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