- NVIDIA is the world’s most valuable company with a market cap exceeding $4.3 trillion as of March 2026.
- Jensen Huang co-founded the company in 1993 at a Denny’s restaurant with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.
- His net worth stands at approximately $164 billion, making him the seventh-wealthiest person alive.
- NVIDIA’s data center revenue hit $194 billion in fiscal 2026, capturing 86% of the AI chip market.
$4.3 Trillion and a Leather Jacket: NVIDIA in 2026
NVIDIA controls the infrastructure of artificial intelligence. Its GPUs power every major AI model on the planet — from OpenAI’s GPT to Google’s Gemini to Meta’s Llama. In fiscal 2026, the company posted $194 billion in data center revenue alone, up 75% year over year, driven by insatiable demand for its Blackwell architecture. At GTC 2026, Jensen Huang signaled $1 trillion in forward orders for Blackwell and its successor, Vera Rubin, through 2027.
The man behind all of it still wears the same black leather jacket he has worn for decades. He has run NVIDIA for 33 years without interruption — the longest-tenured CEO in the semiconductor industry. His 3.5% stake in the company is worth more than $150 billion. He received the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor, the highest recognition in electrical engineering.
A Boy From Taipei Who Couldn’t Speak English
Jensen Huang was born on February 17, 1963, in Taipei, Taiwan. His father, Huang Hsing-tai, was a chemical engineer at an oil refinery. His mother, Lo Tsai-hsiu, was a schoolteacher. When Jensen was five, the family moved to Thailand to support his father’s career. They stayed four years.
At nine, Jensen and his older brother were sent to the United States to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington — escaping social unrest in Thailand. Neither boy spoke English. Their uncle, a recent immigrant himself, accidentally enrolled them at Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, a reform school for troubled youth, believing it was a prestigious boarding school. Jensen’s parents sold nearly everything they owned to cover tuition.
He survived. He adapted. He later moved to Oregon, graduated from Aloha High School, and worked his way through as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter at a Denny’s. That restaurant would later become the birthplace of a trillion-dollar company.
AMD, LSI Logic, and Two Engineers at a Denny’s Booth
After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984, Huang joined Advanced Micro Devices as a microprocessor designer. He stayed just over a year before moving to LSI Logic, where he spent eight years climbing from engineer to director of the CoreWare division. He worked on graphics accelerator cards. He studied nights and weekends to earn a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1992.
At LSI Logic, Huang became friends with two Sun Microsystems engineers: Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. All three believed the future of computing was visual — that graphics processing would become as important as general-purpose CPUs. In January 1993, the trio met at a Denny’s in San Jose and decided to start a company. Huang was 30 years old. They picked him to be CEO.
”If you want to build something great, it’s not easy. You have to suffer, you have to struggle, you have to endeavor. There are no such things that are great, that are easy to do.”
The CUDA Bet That Everyone Thought Was Crazy
NVIDIA nearly died in its first decade. The company’s first product, the NV1 chip in 1995, was a commercial failure — its proprietary approach to 3D graphics lost to the industry-standard OpenGL. By 1996, NVIDIA had ten employees and enough cash for one more attempt. The RIVA 128, launched in 1997, sold a million units in four months and saved the company. The GeForce 256, released in 1999, was marketed as the world’s first GPU — a term NVIDIA invented.
But the real inflection came in 2006 with CUDA, a programming platform that let developers use GPUs for general-purpose computing, not just rendering pixels. Wall Street hated it. Analysts questioned why a gaming chip company was spending hundreds of millions on scientific computing software. Huang doubled down anyway.
”Without GeForce there would be no CUDA. Without CUDA there would be no AI.”
CUDA turned GPUs into the parallel processing engines that machine learning researchers desperately needed. By the time deep learning exploded in 2012 — when AlexNet won the ImageNet competition running on NVIDIA GPUs — the ecosystem was already built. Every major AI lab in the world was already coding in CUDA.
From Gaming Company to the Engine of the AI Revolution
The pivot from gaming to AI infrastructure was not sudden. It was a decade-long grind. NVIDIA launched the Tesla GPU line for data centers in 2007. It introduced the DGX-1 supercomputer in 2016, purpose-built for deep learning. Revenue from data centers surpassed gaming for the first time in 2021.
Then ChatGPT happened. OpenAI’s November 2022 launch triggered a global scramble for GPU compute. Every hyperscaler — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta — placed massive orders for NVIDIA’s A100 and H100 chips. NVIDIA’s revenue went from $27 billion in fiscal 2023 to $61 billion in fiscal 2024 to $130 billion in fiscal 2025. Data center revenue alone grew from $15 billion to $115 billion in two years.
The company’s market cap crossed $1 trillion in June 2023, $2 trillion in February 2024, and $3 trillion by June 2024 — briefly surpassing Apple and Microsoft to become the most valuable company on Earth.
Blackwell, Vera Rubin, and the Road to $1 Trillion in Revenue
Jensen Huang is not slowing down. NVIDIA’s Blackwell architecture, shipping in volume since late 2025, delivers four times the AI training performance of its predecessor at improved energy efficiency. Supply commitments nearly doubled in a single quarter, from $50 billion to $95 billion by the end of Q4 fiscal 2026. Wall Street now projects $1 trillion in cumulative Blackwell revenue by 2027.
The next generation, codenamed Vera Rubin, is already in development. NVIDIA is also pushing into physical AI — robotics, autonomous vehicles, digital twins — with its Omniverse platform. Huang has said he believes AI will move from generating text and images to understanding and interacting with the physical world.
”To this day I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee. I mean that in a happy way, because you want to refine the character of your company.”
He is 63 years old. He has no plans to retire. The dishwasher from Denny’s built the most valuable company in the world, and he is still wearing the same leather jacket.
