Above a table in a San Jose, Calif., Denny’s hangs a plaque that reads: “The booth that launched a $1 trillion company.” The breakfast spot is where, in 1993, engineers Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem founded the technology company Nvidia (NVDA). As evidenced by the chain’s celebratory plaque, Nvidia surpassed the $1 trillion mark last year. Today, the company’s dominance in the A.I. revolution has boosted its market cap to nearly $3.6 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
Thank you for signing up!
By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.
Despite its seemingly rapid rise, Nvidia’s trajectory has been in the making for some time. While the company started off with a vision to reimagine realistic 3D graphics with chips known as graphics processing units (GPUs), it faced several pitfalls along the way—including a graphics format issue in 1996 that forced Huang, the company’s CEO, to lay off more than half of its employees
Three years later, Nvidia launched the industry’s first GPU, the GeForce 256, and became a major player in computer graphics and gaming. Despite its success in that industry, Huang decided to pivot toward A.I. more than a decade ago in the hopes that the nascent technology would take off. His bet has paid off handsomely, with Big Tech players like Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META), Google (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) now spending billions of dollars on the Nvidia chips used to power their generative A.I. models.
Besides a penchant for leather jackets, Huang is known for his unique leadership style—his executive team contains more than 60 people, all of whom report directly to the CEO. “It’s not conventional, but I’m certain that it’s the best practice,” Huang told Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, of the structure earlier this year. In addition to Nvidia’s innovation in A.I., data centers and gaming, the company is also a powerhouse in visualization and automotive technologies.
Here’s a look at some of the top leaders helping Nvidia ride the A.I. wave to unprecedented heights:
Huang has served as the CEO and president of Nvidia since its establishment. He owns around 3 percent of the company and has seen his........