Jensen Huang
In plain wordsThe Taiwanese-American co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, whose graphics chips became the main engine for training and running modern AI.
Taiwanese-born American electrical engineer who co-founded NvidiaNvidia, prop. n.: An American chip company whose graphics processors became the main hardware for training and running AI, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. in 1993, with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, and has led it as chief executive ever since. The company built graphics processors for video games, marketing the GeForce 256 (1999) as the first GPUGPU, abbr.: A computer chip first designed to draw video-game graphics that turned out to be ideal for AI, because it can do thousands of simple calculations at the same time., and under Huang invested from 2006 in CUDACUDA, prop. n.: Nvidia's software system for programming its graphics chips to do general calculations. Most AI software is built on it, which is a big reason Nvidia chips dominate AI., a platform for general-purpose computing on GPUs. After researchers used CUDA to train AlexNetAlexNet, prop. n.: The neural network that won a major image-recognition contest by a huge margin in 2012, convincing researchers and companies that deep learning trained on graphics chips was the way forward. (2012), Nvidia's chips, software and networking became the standard infrastructure of deep learningdeep learning, n.: Machine learning done with neural networks built from many stacked layers: raw data such as pixels, sound or text goes in at one end, and each layer turns what it receives into something more abstract.; Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation. in 2016. Demand for data-center GPUs such as the H100H100, prop. n.: Nvidia's flagship AI chip of 2022–2024, so scarce and sought-after during the generative-AI boom that it became a unit of measure for AI computing power. made Nvidia the world's most valuable company in 2024, and in October 2025 the first company valued at more than US$5 trillion. Its sales to China have been shaped by export controls on AI chipsexport controls on AI chips, n.: Government rules that limit which countries and companies may buy the most advanced AI chips and the machines used to make them. The United States uses them mainly to slow China's progress in AI.. He shared the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with Nvidia's chief scientist, Bill Dally, and received the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor.
Related
- NvidiaNvidia, prop. n.: An American chip company whose graphics processors became the main hardware for training and running AI, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
- GPUGPU, abbr.: A computer chip first designed to draw video-game graphics that turned out to be ideal for AI, because it can do thousands of simple calculations at the same time.
- CUDACUDA, prop. n.: Nvidia's software system for programming its graphics chips to do general calculations. Most AI software is built on it, which is a big reason Nvidia chips dominate AI.
- AlexNetAlexNet, prop. n.: The neural network that won a major image-recognition contest by a huge margin in 2012, convincing researchers and companies that deep learning trained on graphics chips was the way forward.
- H100H100, prop. n.: Nvidia's flagship AI chip of 2022–2024, so scarce and sought-after during the generative-AI boom that it became a unit of measure for AI computing power.
- export controls on AI chipsexport controls on AI chips, n.: Government rules that limit which countries and companies may buy the most advanced AI chips and the machines used to make them. The United States uses them mainly to slow China's progress in AI.
- AI data centerAI data center, n.: A building or campus packed with AI chips, power equipment and cooling, built to train and run AI models. The biggest use as much electricity as a city.
Mentioned in
NvidiaNvidia, prop. n.: An American chip company whose graphics processors became the main hardware for training and running AI, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world., sovereign AIsovereign AI, n.: A country's ability to build and run AI on its own terms, so that the computers, models and know-how it relies on cannot be withheld or dictated by foreign companies or governments.