Nvidia, famous for their graphics processing units (GPUs) and other chips which are used in PCs, on Wednesday (October 29) became the first company ever to be valued at $5 trillion. The company’s stock climbed due to the skyrocketing demand for AI software and deals with some of the “biggest companies in AI and corporate America” such as OpenAI, Oracle, Nokia and even drugmaker Eli Lilly, Wall Street Journal reported. From being valued at $10 billion in 2015 to $5 trillion just over a decade later is inconceivable and yet Nvidia has managed it. Currently, it is the most-valued company in the world; way ahead of its competitors like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Apple and Alphabet (Google).
Already, one of the richest men in the world, many are curious to know how the unprecedented rising of Nvidia’s stocks and subsequent increase in its worth has impacted its CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang. Surely, if Nvidia is doing well so must the person who runs it. Let’s find out:
What is Jensen Huang’s net worth
Taiwanese-American Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its CEO ever since. The company produces the graphics processing units (GPUs) chips which are essential for computer games, rendering graphics and videos, editing videos, coding, cryptocurrency mining and AI tasks. According to Forbes, Nvidia became the dominant GPU tech company for video games under Huang who has now taken a step further and made the same possible for AI now. The company went public in 1999 and Huang owns approximately 3% of it which might not seem like much, but is enough to rank him at #8 on the Forbes list of billionaires.
Huang’s real time net worth is $179.6 billion, a 2.96% rise which translates to $5.2 billion in currency. This puts him right behind Bernard Arnault and family who are the owners of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company but above billionaires like Steve Balmer at #9 and Michael Dell at #10. As Nvidia’s stock price rose, so did Huang’s net worth. For context, only 6 years back in 2019, Huang’s net worth was $3 billion and it kept rapidly rising until it was $90 billion in 2024 to its current worth. As AI’s prospects continue to grow, so will Nvidia and so will Huang.
About Jensen Huang
Born to Taiwanese parents on February 16 1963 in Taipei, Jensen is the younger of two sons. His father was a chemical engineer at an oil refinery while his mother was a school teacher. The family was a middle-class one and relocated often due to the nature of his father’s work. When he was 5-years-old, the entire family moved to Thailand on account of his father’s job and remained there for four years.
However, they had to leave the country in 1973 due to widespread social unrest in Thailand and move to the United States. He faced intense bullying and beatings while studying at the Oneida Baptist institute where he and his brother were mistakenly enrolled as it was assumed to be a prestigious boarding school, when it was in fact a religious reform academy for troubled youth.
He went on to attend high school in Oregon and subsequently enrolled in the Oregon State University where he studied electrical engineering and computer science. In 1992, he went on to earn a master’s degree at Stanford University in electrical engineering as he concurrently worked in Silicon valley as a microchip designer. The following year he co-founded Nvidia with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky and the rest as we know it, is history.
