When the pandemic forced Nvidia Corporation to unveil its big product online, CEO Jensen Huang promoted the event by posting a video from his kitchen, where he took the company's new chip out of the oven.
"I want to show you something," said Huang, reaching for the handle of the pot. "This has been simmering for a while," he said, before lifting the pan-sized board out of the oven to reveal "the world's largest graphics card."
That kind of theatrics is exactly what has made this Taiwanese-American immigrant, who usually wears black leather biker jackets at product launches, one of the most famous figures in the computer business.
Last Tuesday, he joined an elite group of tech CEOs who head trillion-dollar companies.
The 2021-year-old Hunag is only the second American CEO, after Jeff Bezos, who was at the head of Amazon until XNUMX, and who managed to achieve that enviable amount with the company he founded.
Reuters points out that after the late head of Apple, Steve Jobs, there are few directors who are synonymous with their companies, and Huang even has a tattoo on his arm inspired by the Nvidia logo.
Nvidia's chips are at the heart of major technology projects ranging from gaming to autonomous cars to cloud computing and now artificial intelligence (AI).
The company's stock is skyrocketing thanks to the artificial intelligence boom. Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, Nvidia's value has risen from approximately $420 billion to its current level.
Huang's success is partly the result of a desire to solve the thorny problems of computer science through a combination of software and hardware—a vision he's been refining for three decades.
Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the United States as a child, where he earned engineering degrees from Oregon State University and Stanford University.
Huang enjoys huge popularity in Taiwan, a country considered a giant in the semiconductor industry, and was greeted like a rock star when he visited the Taipei trade show last Sunday. He was the keynote speaker, and his two-hour presentation was attended by thousands of people.
In his speech, as reported by the "Financial Times", he warned that the traditional technology industry will not be able to keep up with the progress of AI, adding that this technology has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry into programming. "We are entering a new era of computing," Huang said, arguing that AI has now enabled individuals to create programs just by typing in commands. "Now everyone is a developer. You just need to say something to the computer," he said, describing the combination of accelerated computing and artificial intelligence as "reinvention from the ground up."
In 1993, when he was 30 years old, Huang founded Nvidia together with Curtis Prijem and Kris Malachovski, with the support of Sequoia Capital from Silicon Valley. The first major breakthrough was specialized chips for running high-intensity motion graphics for computer games, called graphics processing units (GPUs). Even then, Huang didn't see Nvidia solely as a chip company.
"Computer graphics is one of the most complex areas of computer science," Huang told the audience in Silicon Valley in 2021 when he was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award. "You have to understand everything".
By the mid-2000s, Huang and his team realized that Nvidia chips could be used for general computing problems and developed a software platform called CUDA to allow developers of all kinds to program Nvidia chips.
This has sparked a wave of new uses, including cryptocurrency. But Huang recognized that university labs were using his chips for work in artificial intelligence, a special area of computer science that promises to power everything from virtual assistants to autonomous cars. He released a whole series of chips for AI and it paid off.
Nvidia also differs from the others in that it has outsourced part of its production to partners including a Taiwanese semiconductor company, surpassing the model of Intel, which is now worth a fraction of what Nvidia is worth.
"He helped enable a revolution that allowed phones to answer questions aloud, farms to spray weeds but not crops, doctors to predict the properties of new drugs — and many more miracles to come," AI entrepreneur Andrew Ng wrote about Huang in "Time" magazine when he was named one of the 100 most influential people in 2021.
You're chasing shares of chip companies
Despite the skyrocketing growth, some analysts believe that Nvidia's AI chip business still has room to expand as generative AI technology is in its early stages while widespread adoption is expected in the coming years.
Just last Sunday, Nvidia's stock jumped about 25 percent, sparking a run on all AI-related stocks and boosting shares of other chip makers.
"Technology traders and AI mania have pushed Nvidia to a value of one trillion dollars, and that's not a small amount," Argus Research analyst Giom Kelleher said.
"Nvidia is the icon of artificial intelligence at the moment," said Thomas Hayes, chairman of Great Hill Capital. "The market reacts to the AI trend".
However, some analysts have expressed skepticism about whether Nvidia's rapid growth has been fueled by hype that will eventually subside, especially given that interest rates remain high.
Bank of America analyst Michael Hartnett told The Guardian that the rush to AI technology could be a "baby bubble", like bubbles in the past that led the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
Michael Malenio, director of global research for Boston Partners, told Bloomberg that Wall Street's interest in AI seems "feverish." "These are good companies. Go bankrupt that night. However, people are starting to pay fabulous sums for their actions", he said.
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