Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang has built Nvidia over four decades from a maker of graphics chips for gamers into perhaps the most important player in the AI boom. Demand for Nvidia’s chips seems insatiable, with large tech companies racing one another to build out portfolios of massive data centers, each crammed with as many as 100,000 or more of Nvidia’s GPUs. The Trump administration views Nvidia’s chips as strategic assets, and initially said it would restrict sales of almost all Nvidia chips to China, forcing Nvidia to record a $5 billion write-down. But the White House later reversed course, allowing Nvidia to continue sales of its H20 chip—which had been designed to comply with U.S. export controls—to China. Under Huang’s leadership, Nvidia is “moving up the stack,” expanding from hardware to offering cloud-computing services and AI models directly to customers. Huang envisions a new paradigm where AI-enabled assistants become our primary digital interface and GPUs supplant CPUs (central processing units) as the primary workhorses of computing. Nvidia’s market dominance has propelled its shares to record highs and allowing it to be the first company to be valued at more than $4 trillion.