Jensen Huang

Huang came to the United States from Taiwan as a young child and finished high school in Beaverton, Oregon. At about 16, Huang arrived at Oregon State University to study electrical engineering, and later credited the university with opening a window onto the magic behind computers. Huang earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State in 1984.56

Huang went on to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992, completing it while working full time. Today Stanford's Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center bears Huang's name, and Stanford president John Hennessy called the alumnus "truly a great innovator in the Stanford tradition."57

Huang began as a microprocessor designer at AMD from 1983 to 1985, then spent 1985 to 1993 at LSI Logic in a series of positions that included Director of CoreWare. In those early jobs Huang developed design tools for chipmakers and worked alongside Andy Bechtolsheim on the Sun SPARCstation.26

On April 5, 1993, Huang founded NVIDIA together with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, with an initial focus on 3D graphics for gaming and multimedia. Huang has served as NVIDIA's president, chief executive officer, and a member of its board since the company's inception.32

In 1999 NVIDIA introduced the graphics processing unit. The company describes how its invention of the GPU sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, changed computer graphics, and set the stage for reshaping the computing industry. In 2018 the RTX line followed, described by NVIDIA as the first GPU capable of real-time ray tracing.321

A pivotal step came in 2006, when NVIDIA introduced CUDA and opened the parallel processing capabilities of the GPU to science and research. In 2012 NVIDIA GPUs powered the AlexNet neural network, a moment NVIDIA calls the "Big Bang" of modern AI.23

Building on that foundation, Huang led NVIDIA's growth into what the company now calls a data center scale AI infrastructure company. Its platforms serve four large markets: data center, gaming, professional visualization, and automotive, and NVIDIA describes itself as driving the platform shift of accelerated computing and generative AI.21

Huang's work has been widely recognized. The National Academy of Engineering elected Huang in 2024 for contributions in high-powered graphics processing units fueling the artificial intelligence revolution. IEEE presented Huang with its Founders Medal in 2020 and named Huang the 2026 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor, which it calls the pinnacle of career achievement, for leadership in the development of GPUs and their application to scientific computing and AI. The Semiconductor Industry Association gave Huang its Robert N. Noyce Award, the industry's highest honor, in 2021.4910118

In March 2026 Huang was named among the first appointees to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and on October 8, 2026, the White House presented Huang with the National Medal of Science for advancing the graphics processing unit into a general-purpose computing architecture.13114

Universities around the world have honored Huang as well. Oregon State University awarded Huang an honorary Ph.D. in engineering in 2009 and inducted Huang into its College of Engineering Hall of Fame in 2013, and Linköping University in Sweden named Huang an honorary doctor of technology in 2025 for pioneering work in the development of GPUs. Huang also holds honorary doctorates from National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.5121