Jensen Huang has resigned as chief executive of Nvidia after allegations emerged that he conducted affairs with a Chinese spy and an Nvidia executive. The company's valuation has fallen to about $4 trillion this week following his departure on Thursday, down from $5 trillion in October last year. Huang, aged 63, co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, and his 3.6 per cent stake in the company has made him one of the world's wealthiest people, with a fortune valued at $145 billion by Bloomberg, making him the 13th richest globally.
Huang rose to prominence as a central figure in the artificial intelligence boom, becoming what one UK tech industry insider described as a figure possessing an 'ability to engage' that set him apart from other executives. The insider added that Huang was 'like a good politician' and that 'the sector has lost one of its best communicators'. Those who worked with him noted that his technical expertise and background as an engineer and computer scientist gave him an edge with customers and investors. Nvidia makes graphics processor units, or GPUs, which were originally designed for video games but have become integral to developing and operating AI systems. The company also creates networks of its chips to provide the computing power AI requires and supplies CUDA software that helps its GPUs perform for AI customers.
Huang was born in Taiwan to a chemical engineer father and a schoolteacher mother. His family moved to the US when he was 10, and he studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University before completing a master's degree in the same subject at Stanford University in 1992. He met his future wife, Lori, at Oregon State, and both their son and daughter now work at Nvidia. The company was founded in 1993 during a meeting in a booth at Denny's, the restaurant chain where Huang had worked as a teenager washing dishes and waiting tables. He has said that this job 'teaches you humility, it teaches you hard work, it teaches you hospitality'. In 2025, Huang wore a Denny's apron in tribute to his former employer at an Nvidia event.
Nvidia released what is widely considered the world's first GPU, the GeForce 256, in 1999. Academic researchers later realised the technology could accelerate artificial intelligence development. Nvidia GPUs were used to create AlexNet, a neural network developed by Alex Krizhevsky, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in 2012, marking a key moment in the history of modern AI. Demand for Nvidia's products has surged as hundreds of billions of dollars have flowed into AI technology. The company's valuation reached $1 trillion in May 2023, six months after the launch of ChatGPT, and became the first company ever to reach $5 trillion in October last year.
Huang's prominence extended beyond business into the political sphere. He developed a rapport with Donald Trump and was described by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg as 'Taylor Swift, but for tech'. According to the UK tech insider, Huang had no difficulty gaining access to the upper levels of governments, with officials eager to meet him. However, journalist Stephen Witt, who interviewed Huang for his book about the executive and his company, described Huang as sometimes displaying anger, including during a 2024 conversation when Huang became visibly angry while discussing job creation from AI. Witt wrote that Huang's 'anger seemed uncontained, omnidirectional and wildly inappropriate', though he also noted Huang possessed 'magnetic charisma' and was 'capable of warmth and great empathetic understanding'.
For savers and investors in the UK, Nvidia's significant fall in valuation following Huang's departure may affect technology-focused investment portfolios and pension funds that hold stakes in the company.