Nvidia CEO probed over alleged China spy: Who exactly is Jensen Huang?

Some call him the godfather of AI. He's the tech man in the black leather jacket, the chairman, president and CEO of NVIDIA. Instead of having one billion humans use computers, in the future we will have trillions of AIs that use computers. But Jensen Wang's story begins far from Silicon Valley. He was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1963 and immigrated to the United States with his brother when he was nine. A computer at his high school sparked a lifelong fascination and he went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University. There, he met Laurie Mills, his lab partner, future wife and mother of their two children. He completed his master's at Stanford University and worked for multiple tech companies, but it was a fateful meeting with two friends at a Denny's restaurant that would change everything. It was 1993, he was 30, and they took $40,000 in capital and co-founded what would become NVIDIA. And so what happens when we have 100 times more agents using computers? We need 100 times larger semiconductor industry. Their initial goal was to create graphics processing units for fast-moving video games. But their chips would go on to reach far beyond the field, helping power AI, mobile computing and autonomous vehicle technology. In 2017, Huang was named Fortune magazine's Business Person of the Year and the accolades kept coming. In 2024, Nvidia was the most valuable public company in the world. Huang was one of the globe's richest people and a close associate of US President Donald Trump. Today, however, the 63-year-old's position as CEO is being tested as the board is investigating Huang for having an extramarital affair with a woman US officials claim works for Chinese intelligence.