You don’t have to be weird to succeed as the founder of a tech company, but it does seem to help. Mark Zuckerberg is a nerd who constantly looks for ways to prove he’s really an alpha male by cage-fighting and spear-throwing and hunting (he went through a phase of only eating meat from animals he had killed). Jeff Bezos is also exploring the outer reaches of masculine energy. He seems to regard himself as a Marvel hero rather than a mere businessman, and to that end is transforming himself into one giant bicep. Peter Thiel, the Palantir co-founder, is prepping for the apocalypse while ruminating gnomically on the Antichrist. As for Elon Musk, where to start? Apart from siring over a dozen children by IVF and surrogate pregnancies, an obsession with Mars, a far-right fetish and 3am tweeting like a drunk 17-year-old, the weirdest thing about Musk is that he thinks he’s cool.
Amid this gallery of jittery oddballs, Jensen Huang stands out for his apparent sanity. Huang is co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, a manufacturer of high-end microchips known as GPUs which are vital to AI systems. In recent years it has become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Huang is married to a woman he met at university; they have two children. He rarely opines on politics and has not as yet floated any theories about the apocalypse. He doesn’t post memes and he doesn’t cage-fight. Other than wearing a leather jacket at all times, he does not appear to suffer from excessive vanity. Huang is, as Stephen Witt’s biography The Thinking Machine makes clear, an exceptionally driven individual who can be ferociously unpleasant to employees who displease him, but he does not appear to be as emotionally unbalanced as other billionaire CEOs. This might have something to do with where he came from.
Huang was born in Taiwan, in 1963. When he was nine years old, his parents sent him and his brother to America, unaccompanied, to stay with an uncle, in Tacoma, Washington State. From there, Huang was sent to Kentucky to attend a religious boarding school for wayward children (his uncle was under the mistaken impression it was a prestigious school). Oneida Baptist Institute was full of kids from poor families who smoked and carried knives and weren’t much interested in learning. Huang was small, studious, and spoke English with a heavy accent. Inevitably, he was bullied. He was called a “Chink” and tasked with cleaning the toilets.
To get to school, he had to cross a high pedestrian bridge over a river, a tenuous construction of rope and wood. As he was crossing it, the local boys would sometimes grab the ropes and shake. Huang wasn’t scared – at least, he didn’t show he was. He just kept going, stepping across missing planks. A schoolfriend who witnessed these occasions said, “Somehow, it never seemed to affect him… Actually, it looked like he was having fun.” Huang ended up befriending those boys and leading them on adventures in the woods. As an adult, he donated a new building to the school, and spoke fondly of crossing that bridge.
A couple of years after his move to the States, Huang’s parents were able to join him, and the family settled in Oregon. Huang bloomed academically, excelling at maths in particular. He graduated early, aged 16. He also became a nationally ranked table tennis player. Huang had an extraordinary capacity for hard, focused work. Whatever he was doing, he would hone his skills until they were superior to nearly everyone. To earn extra money, he mopped floors at his local table tennis club and got a job at a Denny’s restaurant, starting as a dishwasher and working his way up to server. To this day, the only entry on Huang’s LinkedIn resumé, other than “founder and CEO” of Nvidia, is “Dishwasher, Busboy, Waiter” at Denny’s.
At Oregon State University, Huang met his future wife, Lori Mills, then an older student (pretty much everyone was older than him). She was doing the same major as him, electrical engineering. Huang was not an alpha male, but he was polite and persistent, and he persuaded Mills to share homework sessions with him. “I tried to impress her – not with my looks, of course, but with my strong capability to complete homework,” he tells Witt. After university, he and Mills both worked on microchip design, and by his telling she was more successful than he was, although Mills gave up her career to raise their children.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993, aged 30, with two veteran microchip designers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The three of them drafted the paperwork for it at a Denny’s in San Jose, near Huang’s home. Huang was younger than his co-founders but it was quickly agreed he should be CEO. He was a natural leader, intensely competitive in a way that communicated inner conviction rather than empty bravado. His childhood experiences had made him grow up quickly. “Jensen was always the adult in the room,” said an early employee. “Even when he was the youngest guy in the room, he was the adult.”
That’s not to say there was no bravado. The company’s main product at the time was a microchip the partners had named the “NV1”, because they believed it would make their competitors jealous. The company was named Nvidia after the Latin word for envy, invidia. Nvidia initially focused on developing chips for video games. These chips, known as graphics processing units (GPUs), enabled games makers to produce ultra-realistic visuals. Nvidia became successful quickly and floated in 1999, making Huang and his partners rich.
But for Huang, this was just the beginning. He had vast ambitions and insisted on making risky bets on unproven technologies, even when it meant flirting with corporate disaster. He was convinced that unless Nvidia kept trying different things, new and hungrier competitors would make it obsolete. He often told staff that Nvidia was “30 days from going out of business” and appeared to genuinely relish living with insecurity.
In 2006, Huang made his riskiest bet yet, investing in the speculative technology of “parallel computing” which enabled Nvidia’s chips to perform complex data processing tasks that went far beyond graphics rendering. His investors hated the idea – the stock price had dropped 70 per cent by 2008 – but Huang remained obstinately committed to it. He felt this was the future of computing, even if he wasn’t quite sure why yet.
His company’s fortunes dramatically changed in 2012, when artificial intelligence researchers made a breakthrough using a method known as deep learning, which involved training neural networks on vast datasets. It turned out that Nvidia’s GPUs, which could handle massively complex calculations, were ideal for this task. Huang had, somewhat inadvertently, positioned his company to be the indispensable arms dealer of the AI gold rush. His bet on parallel computing had transformed a video-gaming hardware company into the infrastructure backbone of modern computing; Nvidia’s GPUs power most AI applications, including ChatGPT. By 2023, Nvidia had joined Apple and Google as one of the global tech giants.
[See also: China and America’s AI battle is about more than just tech supremacy – it’s about controlling the future]
When it comes to cultural politics, CEOs tend to blow with the wind. Zuckerberg and other leaders solemnly endorsed Black Lives Matter when it was fashionable to do so, and introduced radical diversity and inclusion policies to their companies. In the wake of Trump’s election came a jarring switch of tone, and an endorsement, implicit or otherwise, of the new president’s cultural agenda. Huang, who keeps his distance from politics, has been more consistent. His views are shaped by the journey he has travelled on since arriving in America, and the effort it took to propel him along it.
He is by no means a Maga-ist, but neither is he remotely woke. In interviews with Witt and others, when he mentions the racism directed against him as a kid he also notes that it never really bothered him. “Back then, there wasn’t a counsellor to talk to,” he tells Witt. “You just had to toughen up and move on.” When Witt asks him about discrimination against Asians at senior levels of American business, he gets a brusque response. “I’m the only Chinese CEO of the time,” says Huang, “but it never occurred to me. And it doesn’t occur to me today.”
Huang retains a mild chippiness against the moneyed and coddled students of America’s elite universities who have the advantages he was denied. In 2024, during a speech at Stanford, he told his audience, “Greatness comes from character. And character isn’t formed out of smart people; it’s formed out of people who suffered.” He evinces a typically Gen-X impatience with what he clearly sees as a millennial or Gen-Z tendency to dwell on slights. “Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” he told the Stanford students, with a trace of sarcasm. “I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you.”
At Nvidia, he apparently teaches it to his staff by humiliating them in public. Most of the time, Huang has a composed demeanour and self-deprecating charm, but he can erupt in molten fury when he senses that others are not pushing themselves as hard as he is. Huang’s dressings-down are legendary, and as far as he is concerned, the more people who witness them, the better. “Failure must be shared,” he says, rather chillingly. In these moments, you sense that he gives free rein to the suppressed anger he must have stored up over years of being pushed around, made to scrub latrines and soak up insults, by people who weren’t nearly as smart or as hard-working as him. So Stephen Witt’s choice of title for his book seems an odd one. For all that Huang is helping to build thinking machines, he himself is an unmistakably, vividly human figure.
Whether or not Nvidia sustains its dominant position in AI chips over the next ten years is a moot point. When the Chinese company DeepSeek released a new AI system that required far fewer GPUs to build than existing American ones, Nvidia’s share price took a steep drop. If the demand for AI increases at a fast rate, however, then even further gains in efficiency won’t put a brake on demand for GPUs. Whatever happens to Nvidia, we can be certain that nobody is more focused on the possibility of failure than Huang. As the world embarks on a wildly uncertain technological transition, there will be no shortage of competitors aiming to bring Nvidia crashing to the ground. Huang knows that despite his company’s titanic success, it is on a rickety bridge – exactly where he likes to be.
Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” is published by Faber & Faber
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
Stephen Witt
Vintage, 272pp, £25
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025