Newshot Jensen Huang
Also written as：黄仁勋 / Jen-Hsun Huang / 黃仁勳 / 黄皮衣
Taiwanese-American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded NVIDIA. He served as its president and CEO from 1993 until his resignation in November 2026, a 33-year tenure, stepping down amid an extramarital-affair and national-security scandal.
Huang was born in Taipei and moved to Tainan as a child before his family relocated to Thailand when he was five. At nine his parents sent him and his older brother to the United States; an aunt and uncle, themselves recent immigrants, mistook a Kentucky religious reform academy for troubled youth for an elite boarding school and enrolled the brothers there. Too young for its classes, he attended the neighbouring public elementary school, scrubbed toilets daily and learned to play table tennis. He later earned a BSc in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and an MSc from Stanford University.
Career
AMD and LSI Logic
After college he designed microchips in Silicon Valley — microprocessors at AMD, then core hardware design at LSI Logic from 1985. On an LSI project for Sun Microsystems he met Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem; together they built the "GX graphics engine", the accelerator card that led to NVIDIA.
Founding NVIDIA (1993)
In April 1993 the three incorporated the company after meetings at a Denny's diner in San Jose. The name came from the Latin invidia — they wanted competitors "green with envy" — and the "i" was later dropped to match the NV1 chip under development. Initial capital was US$600, US$200 from each founder; funding from Sequoia Capital's Don Valentine, introduced through LSI's then-CEO, paid the first wages. Huang became president and CEO at 30, younger than either co-founder.
President and CEO (1993–2026)
He turned a PC-graphics vendor into the supplier of high-performance computing and AI infrastructure:
- 1999: NVIDIA goes public; Huang holds 3.6% of the stock.
- 2007: paid US$24.6 million, ranked the 61st highest-paid US CEO by Forbes.
- May 2023: market capitalisation passes US$1 trillion on AI demand.
- June 2024: passes US$3 trillion. October 2025: first public company to pass US$5 trillion.
- March 2025: announces an open, customisable foundation model for humanoid robots at GTC.
- 2026: awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor and the National Medal of Science; appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
His management style was much described: he kept no fixed office and worked from whatever conference room was free, and at one point had around 60 direct reports, on the view that people reporting to him "should be at the top of their game".
Scandal and resignation (2026)
From 29 October 2026 The New York Times reported that the US government believed Huang had a close relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based buyer of NVIDIA AI chips, and that US intelligence suspected her of having been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. Beijing denied involvement, and later reporting said there was no conclusive proof.
- 4 November: the chairs of three US House committees asked him to appear for a closed briefing.
- 8 November: in an internal memo to employees he acknowledged marital infidelity; the board opened an investigation.
- 9 November: President Trump spoke with him, said he trusted him and disclosed an FBI inquiry. The same day an investor filed a class action alleging the company and Huang failed to disclose related risks.
- 11 November: The Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to remove him; The New York Times reported a second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's vice president of healthcare.
- 12 November: NVIDIA announced he had resigned as CEO, president and director with immediate effect, and named EVP and CFO Colette Kress interim CEO. He retained white-collar defence counsel and agreed to testify before Congress.
Personal life
He met his wife Lori Mills in an engineering lab at Oregon State; they married after five years together and have two children, Spencer and Madison. He has the NVIDIA logo tattooed below his left shoulder — the result of a bet that the team would get inked once the share price passed US$100; his verdict was that it "hurt". He is known for his black leather jacket.
Honours
Ernst & Young High Technology Entrepreneur of the Year (1999); Time 100 most influential people (2021, 2024); member of the US National Academy of Engineering (2024); IEEE Medal of Honor and National Medal of Science (2026).