On his birthday in February, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was cutting a cake to celebrate with his wife at home when he accidentally discovered multiple missed calls from unknown numbers on his phone. The tech giant at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom was about to ignore it, but the phone rang again. "Hello, Jen-Hsun Huang, this is President Trump." A voice came from the other end of the phone.
When Huang's dog started barking, drowning out the call, he initially thought it was a prank: "I said, 'Really? It's President Trump himself?'" he recalled in an interview. The impromptu call lasted 45 minutes. For much of his career, Huang was little known outside Silicon Valley, and Nvidia's chips were not even considered mainstream in technology.
For a long time, chips have been the "unpopular stepchildren" in the digital world. People pay more attention to the devices they drive and the services they run, while mostly turning a blind eye to the chips themselves. But this year, chips have become the core driving force behind the artificial intelligence craze sweeping the business and financial worlds.
The Financial Times named Huang Jen-Hsun Person of the Year based on his key role in this change. Huang has led one of the largest-ever private sector investment programs that has shored up both the U.S. economy and the stock market boom. At the same time, the technology he promoted has the potential to reshape the entire industry. Nvidia is now the world's most valuable company and at one point this year became the first company to surpass $5 trillion in market capitalization (it was worth $4.4 trillion as of Thursday evening). By the end of 2025, Huang's net worth will exceed $160 billion, making him one of the top ten richest people in the world. Even if the current valuation is frothy and the stock price is cut in half, Nvidia's market value will still be three times what it was at the end of 2021.
Jen-Hsun Huang has always warned that any lead in technology is fragile, and he has been the first to warn of the risks of complacency. Several large technology companies, led by Google, are developing their own chips to compete with Nvidia. However, three years after the launch of ChatGPT sparked a global race for artificial intelligence, Nvidia’s leading position in artificial intelligence chip manufacturing remains solid.
Although the sudden attention has thrust Huang into a public role as a technology prophet and visionary, he is already ready to shoulder this responsibility. He called Nvidia "one of the most influential technology companies in history," and his tone was as plain as many of his public statements. “The computer technology we spent 30 years inventing is now fundamentally changing the entire field of computing,” he said. “We are creating a new digital intelligence industry.”
2025 will go down in history as the year data centers entered the public consciousness. The rush to build massive new computing facilities to meet future artificial intelligence needs has made it a bright spot in a sluggish economy, accounting for a sizable share of U.S. gross domestic product growth. As a major supplier of artificial intelligence chips, which account for about half of data center costs, Nvidia's performance has soared. Some critics believe that Huang invests company funds in other artificial intelligence companies, including his own customers. This circular trading model is risky and may artificially drive up demand for his chips.
But Huang Renxun said that diversification of investment is to cultivate a broader artificial intelligence ecosystem. He said Nvidia's investments, which are "billions of dollars and related businesses are hundreds of billions of dollars in size," are too small to have much of an impact on overall demand: "It's not even enough to cover customer purchases." Since this summer, Nvidia has also made a series of high-profile commitments, including investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI over the next few years. As concerns about a bubble grow, other leaders in artificial intelligence, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have publicly warned of the risks. But Huang Renxun, who has an engineer's mindset, only focuses on transactions that he can control. "The discussion about investment is very hot, but actual investors are very cautious," he insisted. "Most of the actual investors I have met are quite self-disciplined." When talking about the reasons for large-scale investments and their duration, Huang Renxun became more and more eloquent. He declared that the global digital infrastructure needed a complete overhaul. "It's taken us 60 years to get here," he said, "and it would take more than two years to modernize all the computers in the world."
This year, Huang has given a series of loosely scripted and surprisingly long keynote speeches in various locations around the world, and his style is on display - always able to quickly cut into topics that may seem obscure to ordinary listeners. Even though audiences may not be familiar with the details of chip architecture and advanced software he's passionate about discussing, his star power can still fill venues. His signature leather jackets (introduced this year in sequins) have become as influential a personal brand as Steve Jobs' turtlenecks. A video of him drinking beer arm in arm with Samsung and Hyundai executives went viral on the Internet. “Real-time manufacturing intelligence is something completely new in the world,” he said. “Every country will have it, every company will use it, every industry will apply it. This manufacturing industry could be trillions of dollars in size, and it’s just getting started.”
Nvidia’s growth stemmed from a series of big bets that others either didn’t foresee or weren’t willing to take.
Huang attributes these bets to confidence in his own judgment—confidence, bolstered by a small team of core lieutenants, that allows him to pinpoint the technological power to reshape the world. “The ability to foresee the future, the ability to believe in an idea, ultimately comes down to the ability to reason back to the source,” he said. Huang said he "intuitively tests" his beliefs "every morning."
His first big bet was that traditional chip designs would eventually be unable to meet the growing performance demands of microprocessors. In his view, the architecture of Nvidia's gaming chips makes it possible to become a replacement, and this will all start with the advanced computing power required for scientific research. A few years later, he made a second bet - developing a layer of software that would allow more developers to take advantage of the chip's capabilities. Both initiatives were expensive explorations into new areas for which there was little market demand. “No customers are asking for it, no competitors are doing similar things, and you’re left alone without any external recognition,” Huang said. It was not until later that the rise of machine learning became the perfect application scenario for his dream of scientific research computing. A software layer called CUDA makes it easier for developers to develop artificial intelligence applications to use Nvidia chips than competitors' products, making it one of the company's core strategic weapons.
Jay Puri, Nvidia's sales director and one of Huang Renxun's closest confidants, said that the chip industry has never lacked so-called visionaries who predict the future of technology, but what is rare about Huang Renxun is that he has the courage to make big bets and stick to it. “It’s one thing to have a dream, it’s another thing to implement it,” he said. Once the tech giant has an idea, it's hard to change course — even after years of investing have hurt profits and attracted the attention of activist investors.
Tenacity, focus and flat management
To explain the personal characteristics behind this, Mike Moritz, the former chairman of Sequoia Capital, an early investor in Nvidia, mentioned the experience of being on the verge of bankruptcy after the company's first chip failed. "The resilience, perseverance and talent that Jensen Huang displayed when leading the company through the crisis were the first manifestation of his subsequent firm will," he said. Extreme concentration is always the key factor. "I start working from the moment I wake up and don't stop until I go to bed," Huang said. "I don't have any hobbies. The first priority is taking care of my family, and other than that, I devote all my time to work."
This intense passion for work and extreme attention to engineering details have shaped a company with a CEO at its core and an unusually flat management structure. Huang said the company has 50 to 60 executives reporting directly to him — he’s not sure of the exact number — and he’s abandoned traditional corporate hierarchies. “The way information is delivered is prone to errors and employees lack autonomy,” he said. Puri added that part of the purpose of this arrangement was to break down the power centers that exist in most companies, where "people try to gain power by controlling information," and "he didn't want employees to be entrenched in their silos."
Huang Renxun said that this model has fostered a tough corporate culture, and he regards Nvidia employees as "family." But he was also a tough boss, sometimes berating executives in public. Huang himself likes to describe this public criticism as a tactic. He said the common management practice of praising employees publicly and criticizing them privately was "exactly the opposite of the right approach." It is much better to point out problems openly so that everyone can learn from the failure. “That’s exactly what we’re after,” he says, as if any show of emotion is just another engineering tweak. But for those being criticized, it doesn’t feel that way. “When he’s emotionally engaged, that intensity can feel personal,” Puri said, “but it’s not—he’s just very emotionally intense and focused on the issues that we’re addressing and need to improve.”
A pragmatic view of the future of artificial intelligence
Huang disagrees with some of Silicon Valley’s orthodox views on the ways artificial intelligence might change the world. The tech elite seems to be split between "doomsayers" and "accelerationists" - pessimists who worry that artificial intelligence will run out of control and cause catastrophic harm, while optimists want to rush to a new stage of superintelligence. Huang Renxun dismisses both groups. He dismisses doomsayers who predict that artificial intelligence will lead to mass unemployment. So far, artificial intelligence has only taken over specific aspects of some jobs, rather than putting people out of work. “I think people confuse task automation with the essential purpose of work,” he said.
At the same time, he has little patience for the futuristic rhetoric that is common in discussions of artificial intelligence — talk of new kinds of intelligence that might one day surpass human capabilities. “The road map to hard-to-define general artificial intelligence is unclear,” he said, adding, “I don’t think it’s that important either.” Instead, he describes the next phase of AI as an engineering challenge — improving the technology behind services like ChatGPT so that it can be used more widely. "Artificial intelligence is more than chatbots," he said. "Artificial intelligence covers many industries around the world. I believe that the possibility that artificial intelligence cannot bring about large-scale industrial productivity improvements is very low."
It all sounds mundane and homely, especially compared to a tech visionary like Elon Musk, who envisions a future that includes space travel and an army of robot assistants. Jen-Hsun Huang is unapologetic about this. “I try to stay away from science fiction,” he said. “I think there’s no benefit in fantasizing about the future of artificial intelligence, which leads people to either overinvest or underinvest. I try to stay pragmatic.”