Jensen Huang

Some people build tools, and some people build the infrastructure on which everyone else builds their tools. Jensen Huang belongs to the second group. Born in Taiwan in 1963 and raised between Thailand and the United States, he studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and then earned a master's degree at Stanford, not yet imagining that he would one day found the most valuable company on the planet. In 1993, at thirty years old and with limited capital, he co-founded NVIDIA from a booth at a Denny's in San Jose, California. The idea was simple: create specialized chips for video game graphics. No one saw beyond that.

But Jensen did. In the early 2000s, NVIDIA began to notice that its GPUs (graphics processing units) were doing something unexpected: they were extraordinarily good at processing thousands of mathematical operations in parallel, exactly what artificial intelligence researchers needed to train neural networks. In 2006, NVIDIA launched CUDA, a platform that allowed programmers to use those GPUs for general-purpose computing. That was the moment that changed everything. When Geoffrey Hinton and his students trained AlexNet in 2012 and sparked the modern deep learning revolution, they did it on NVIDIA GPUs. Since then, every major AI model, including those behind Claude and ChatGPT, is trained on Jensen Huang's hardware.

NVIDIA's growth is one of the most extraordinary business stories in recent history. The company surpassed $4 trillion in market capitalization in 2025, becoming one of the most valuable companies of all time. Jensen received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2026 (the highest recognition in electrical engineering), the Robert N. Noyce Award from the Semiconductor Industry Association, the IEEE Founders Medal, and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li, among others. Fortune, The Economist, and Brand Finance have all named him the world's best CEO.

To me, Jensen's lesson isn't about technology, it's about long-term vision and intelligent stubbornness. He didn't "pivot" from games to AI because it was trendy; he built something so good in its domain that the world needed it for something bigger. Every time you use an AI tool, from generating an image to chatting with Claude, there's an NVIDIA GPU working in some data center somewhere in the world. Jensen has been building that engine for more than thirty years. And he still isn't done.