[News Figures] Equity Value of 46 Trillion Won 'Leather Jacket Man'... NVIDIA CEO 'Jensen Huang'

CEO from Taiwanese Immigrant Background Enjoying Leather Jackets
Started Business Without Company Name, Only Debt
Emerges as Top Beneficiary of AI Boom

American semiconductor company Nvidia joined the "trillion-dollar market capitalization club" on the 30th (local time), drawing attention to its founder Jensen Huang. Nvidia's market cap surpassing $1 trillion marks exactly 30 years since Jensen Huang founded the company in 1993.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, was born in 1963 in Taipei, Taiwan. At the age of nine, he moved with his family to Thailand and later immigrated to the United States. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992.

After graduating from university, CEO Huang worked on microprocessor design at semiconductor companies LSI Logic and AMD. In 1993, he co-founded Nvidia with Curtis Priem, who was designing graphics chipsets at Microsystems, and electronics expert Chris Malachowsky. He has served as CEO for 30 years.

Apple's Steve Jobs insisted on black turtleneck shirts, Levi's jeans, and New Balance sneakers, while Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg preferred gray T-shirts, hoodies, jeans, and sneakers. Jensen Huang's trademark is a black leather jacket. In various media interviews, he has said, "The leather jacket is my symbol."

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, giving a speech at Taiwan's 'Computex' on the 29th
[Photo by Yonhap News]

Founded Without a Company Name... What Does 'Nvidia' Mean?

Nvidia started its business carrying debt and initially had no company name. At that time, Jensen Huang took the first letters of "next version" and attached "NV" to all files. Later, the co-founders searched for words containing the two letters "NV" to register the corporation and found the Latin word "invidia," meaning "envy." That is how the current company name was decided.

Nvidia released its first product, the PC multimedia card "NV1," in 1995. It was a time when 3D graphics were just beginning to gain attention in the gaming industry, but product sales were not smooth. Later, in 1999, Nvidia launched the first GeForce product line, the "GeForce 256" (NV10).

CEO Huang defined this as a "graphics processing unit" (GPU). From that point on, the GPU began to be regarded as a key product alongside the central processing unit (CPU), the core of the PC.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Gradually gaining recognition in the industry, Nvidia successfully went public on NASDAQ in 1999. That year, it released the "GeForce 256," and in 2006, introduced the parallel computing architecture "CUDA." This allowed technology that had been confined to the video game domain to be applied to all types of computing.

Although the chip "Tegra," developed for the smartphone business in 2014, did not make much impact, Nvidia succeeded in modifying this technology for automotive use. By reapplying technologies that had previously failed or shown low sales, Nvidia is currently gaining new revenue opportunities in industries such as finance, automotive, manufacturing, AI, and security.

Meanwhile, CEO Huang holds about 3.5% of Nvidia's shares. With Nvidia's market cap surpassing $1 trillion, the value of his stake has reached $35 billion (46.305 trillion KRW).