The extraordinary rise — and possible fall — of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang

For Nvidia, the scandal presents unique challenges, beyond a CEO’s infidelity. The woman who is suspected of sending information to China was an executive at a Singapore-based company that bought billions of dollars worth of equipment from Nvidia – some of which may have reached China. Huang, who is one of the richest men in the world, is deeply involved in running the company, where he has 60 direct reports. He has said he works seven days a week and is reported to have a Nvidia tattoo. Huang has said (opens in new tab) he doesn’t believe in succession planning, so there’s no clear plan for a successor.

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Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang moved with his family to Thailand when he was young, and when he was 9, his parents sent him and his brother to live in Washington state with family members to escape social unrest. His aunt and uncle sent the siblings to a school in Kentucky that turned out to be more reform school than prep school. Huang said he scrubbed all the toilets in the dorm building every day, learned to play table tennis, and taught his much older roommate how to read.

“I remember that part of my life more vividly than just about any other,” he told Wired in 2002.

Soon, Huang’s parents joined the boys in the U.S. and the family settled down in Oregon. His teenage years were filled with part-time jobs — busboy, dishwasher, and waiter at Denny’s — while he excelled at school and table tennis. He became a nationally ranked player and graduated from high school early to study electrical engineering at Oregon State.

It was there when he was just 17 that he met Lori Mills, who was also studying electrical engineering. His pickup line, according to “The Nvidia Way,” a biography by Tae Kim, was “Do you want to see my homework?”

After graduation, the couple married and moved to San Jose so Huang could take a job designing microchips at AMD, kicking off his decades-long career in semiconductors. He attended Stanford part-time while holding down his day job, slowly earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He moved on to another Silicon Valley chipmaker, LSI Logic, where he worked with Sun Microsystems.

Starting in 1992, Huang and two Sun employees, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, sketched out the vision for Nvidia during regular visits to a Denny’s in San Jose. According to The Wall Street Journal, the trio set up shop there so long that the staff eventually moved them to a back room.

Nvidia was officially founded in 1993 — the NV in its name stood for ‘next version’, according to Fortune — and its first office was set up in Sunnyvale, located by an expressway and a Wells Fargo branch. Its vision was to make better 3D graphics chips for gaming PCs. The company’s first product, the NV1, failed; its second was canceled; and the third, the Riva 128, featured an entirely different design and was what finally saved the company in 1997.

“We built Riva 128 just as we were running out of money. The Riva 128 shocked the young 3D market, put us on the map, and saved the company,” Huang said in a 2023 commencement (opens in new tab) speech at National Taiwan University.

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Until recently, coverage of the family’s life had laid out a neat, unremarkable narrative. Huang mentions his marriage, and his wife’s support, frequently in interviews. “I have a perfect life,” he said at the Stanford event. Asked about the black leather jacket he is famous for wearing, Huang said that his wife had picked it out.

“This is what my wife bought for me and this is what I’m wearing,” he said. “I do zero percent of my own shopping.”

The couple had two children in quick succession while Huang was moving up in his career. Now in their 30s, both have high-profile jobs at Nvidia. After studying baking and working in the food industry, his daughter Madison Huang worked at LVMH and earned an MBA at London Business School. She started as an intern at Nvidia in 2020, and is now senior director of product marketing for physical AI. His son Spencer Huang started as an intern in 2010, according to his LinkedIn, before opening a cocktail bar in Taipei. He has been back at the company for more than four years and is the director of robotics product.

Huang has addressed concerns about nepotism in the past, according to The Information, saying that parents would only recommend hiring children who wouldn’t embarrass them. The report also said Malachowsky and board member Aarti Shah have children who work at the company.

In 2017, Huang planted roots in San Francisco. He is reported to have purchased a Pacific Heights mansion for $38 million. Through their foundation, Huang and his wife have pledged a $75 million matching gift to help create the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design in San Francisco. They’ve also committed $5 million a year to the San Francisco Opera.

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In 1999, Nvidia went public, its shares priced at $12 apiece. The plan was always for Huang to run the business side of Nvidia, while Malachowsky managed hardware and Priem software. Priem left in 2003 and Malachowsky kept a low-profile, leaving Huang to become the public face of the company.

Like Steve Jobs before him, Huang took the classic Silicon Valley route of adopting a signature look. His was the black leather jacket, which gave him a slightly cooler, midlife-crisis air than most tech CEOs. In the 2000s, his public persona grew with long profiles, professional photo shoots, keynote speeches, and conference appearances. Then in 2017, Fortune named him Businessperson of the Year. Still, the dry nature of the chip business kept him from being as much of a household name as heads of consumer-facing companies such as Apple’s Jobs, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Google’s cofounders.

Then came the AI boom.

He’d had a history of talking about potential markets that didn’t exist yet — what he called “zero billion markets.” AI was one of those bets that paid off spectacularly. Huang said in the National Taiwan University commencement speech that once the company saw deep learning’s potential, it turned all its resources to the technology. In 2007, the company released software called CUDA that made it possible for its chips to be used for more than just graphics. Nividia built it into every gaming card, despite the cost — a bet that paid off when early AI researchers discovered the technology. The company focused on selling to data centers and designing the chips that would eventually power the AI boom.

In 2016, Huang personally delivered Nvidia’s DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Elon Musk at OpenAI, which at the time was a nonprofit research lab. Nvidia increased its business with big tech companies, cloud companies, AI labs, and governments.

In May 2023, after a particularly positive earnings forecast, the company’s market value rose by $184 billion in one day. Huang’s own net worth shot up $6 billion. On May 30, Nvidia reached a $1 trillion market capitalization, and a year later it briefly became the most valuable public company in the world. Now, the vast majority of chips used to power AI are designed by Nvidia.

It was during this rapid rise that reports first linked Huang to the woman he has since admitted having an affair with, Alice Huang.

His power showed up in unexpected places. Oracle CTO Larry Ellison joked on an earnings call that he and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were “begging Jensen for GPUs” at a dinner at Nobu Palo Alto. He became close to President Donald Trump, lobbying him to loosen restrictions on Nvidia chip sales to China.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, Huang has been at the forefront of a growing alliance between Silicon Valley’s AI’s titans and the administration. He has become a frequent visitor to the White House, lobbying Trump to loosen restrictions on chip sales to China and pushing back against tighter AI regulation. His influence even extended to policy making: Trump appointed him to a presidential science and technology advisory council and awarded him the National Medal of Science in 2026.

Huang spent 33 years making Nvidia indispensable to the technology industry. In the process he may also have made himself indispensable to Nvidia. Now the company faces a question it has never had to answer: What happens without him?