Meet Jensen Huang, the visionary behind NVIDIA's $5 trillion success

Technology Jan 07, 2026

Jensen Huang, who co-founded NVIDIA and still leads it today, just received the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor for his game-changing work in accelerated computing.
Thanks to his vision, NVIDIA hit a $5 trillion market cap last year.

From Taiwan to Silicon Valley legend

Huang grew up in Taiwan and Thailand before moving to the US at age nine.
After studying engineering at Oregon State and Stanford, he worked at AMD and LSI Logic—then co-founded NVIDIA in 1993.

Revolutionizing gaming and powering AI

NVIDIA's first big win was launching the GeForce 256—the world's first GPU—in 1999, kicking off a new era for PC gaming.
Later, their CUDA platform let GPUs handle way more than graphics, helping drive breakthroughs like AlexNet and ChatGPT.
Today, NVIDIA tech is everywhere AI is making an impact.