Nvidia’s technological prowess has lifted the chip giant to the commanding heights of the red-hot artificial intelligence space.
But a former employee provided a key insight into CEO Jensen Huang’s management philosophy that has also been key to the company’s stratospheric rise.
Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm, worked at Nvidia in the early 2010s and told the Financial Times that Huang organized the company around projects rather than traditional hierarchies, allowing him to access any layer of management and get answers directly.
“It’s a very unique culture,” Haas told the FT. “The benefit of that is transparency and speed. And I think that is one of the things that Nvidia is really, really good at. They move very, very fast, they’re very, very purposeful.”
That speed was on full display earlier this month, when Huang surprised Wall Street by laying out a rapid cadence of new AI platforms.
Last week, he said Nvidia plans to upgrade its AI accelerators every year as he announced the Blackwell Ultra chip for 2025 and a next-generation platform in development called Rubin for 2026.
The Computex trade show in Taiwan this past week fueled continued bullishness on AI and the chip sector, helping briefly boost Nvidia’s market cap to the $3 trillion mark for the first time. That capped an epic rally that has seen the company’s stock soar over 3,100% over the last five years and more than 200% in just the last year.
In the process, Huang’s personal wealth has surged too. On Friday, he topped Michael Dell to become the world’s 13th-richest person with a net worth of $106.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
For his part, Huang—who is among the 22 CEOs who founded their Fortune 500 companies—has acknowledged that he is a demanding perfectionist and is not easy to work for.
“It should be like that. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy,” he told 60 Minutes in April.