From Denny's dishwasher to AI rock star: the rise and fall of Nvidia's Jensen Huang
From washing dishes at Denny’s to rockstar of AI: the rise and fall of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday after being alleged to have had affairs with a Chinese spy and a company executive, and the company's market value fell back to about 4 trillion dollars this week. Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem at a Denny's restaurant, and in 1999 launched the GeForce 256, widely regarded as the world's first GPU; in 2012, University of Toronto researchers trained AlexNet on Nvidia GPUs, regarded as a key moment in the history of modern AI. Half a year after ChatGPT's release, Nvidia's market value reached 1 trillion dollars in May 2023, and last October it became the first company to reach a market value of 5 trillion dollars. According to Bloomberg, Huang holds 3.6% of the company's shares, with wealth of about 145 billion dollars, ranking 13th in the world.
The feature traces Jensen Huang's path from restaurant dishwasher to head of Nvidia, which can serve as background for understanding the current turmoil at this AI chip giant.