Nvidia’s Jensen Huang: prophet of the AI age

Jensen Huang’s Nvidia started out in computer games. That may have been merely a toehold on the route to global dominance in the tech industry.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
(Image credit: © Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In 1993, Jensen Huang quit a well-paid position as a Silicon Valley chip designer to launch a videogames venture with two friends. They called it Nvidia – a play on the Latin word for “envy”. At the time, “many people thought he was mad”, says The Times, and he struggled to raise seed capital. But nearly 30 years on, Huang is presiding over the largest and most valuable semiconductor company in the world and hailed as one of tech’s great visionaries. “Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk – I put Jensen in that group,” says one admirer.

Sprinkled with 21st-century gold dust

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.