Leather jacket and autographs in underwear: the unexpected rise of Jensen Huang, the “Taylor Swift of technology”

The scene was at a tech fair, but it looked more like a music festival: Early last month, Jensen Huang arrived in Taipei to a rock star’s welcome. A sea of ​​phones towered overhead, recording the CEO’s every move. Nvidiadressed in what is already his trademark leather jacket. In the midst of the commotion, a woman opens her blouse and asks him to stamp his autograph on her underwear. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” asks Huang, half amused and half confused, and finally proceeds to scribble his signature. A little later, he repeats the action, this time on the body of a car. The question is obvious to those who do not follow the ins and outs of the technology industry: who is this man who suddenly rivals other figures in the sector such as Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg in popularity?

Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang could have become one of those technological entrepreneurs of whom little is known outside his circle, but he has become a symbol of success for the Asian-American community and, especially, for his native country. His is one of those deceptive stories of overcoming that advocate “if you want, you can.” At the age of five, his family emigrated to Thailand and at nine his parents sent him to study in the United States. There he suffered bullying at school for his Asian origins and began working at 15 in a restaurant chain, washing dishes and as a waiter. After studying electrical engineering at the University of Oregon and a master’s degree at Stanford University, in 1993 he was one of the three founders of Nvidia, a company born to create graphic processors that would allow the reproduction of more realistic and complex images, at a time when the video game industry was taking off.

Leather and Artificial Intelligence

If Steve Jobs had the iPhone as his flagship and Elon Musk had Tesla cars, Jensen Huang had a more difficult time presenting the world with an object of desire that would identify with his character. His thing was graphics cards, that hidden part inside computers and video game consoles that very few users see. However, he managed to cultivate his image in the eyes of the public in a very simple way. In most of his appearances, Huang maintains the same look: dark clothes and, most importantly, a leather jacket that counteracts his air of geek middle-aged. Like Jobs’ turtleneck sweater or Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirt, it was intended to make him identifiable among the maelstrom of Californian tech entrepreneurs.

The strategy worked. An example: last March, Zuckerberg posted a photo on Instagram with Huang in which they exchanged coats. When asked by a user who did not know who Huang was, the founder of Meta clarified: “She’s like Taylor Swift, but in technology.” Previously, in 2021, Time magazine named him among the 100 most important personalities of the year and chose him as one of the seven who appeared on the cover. Of course, with his leather jacket.

But Huang’s rise to public status at an age when retirement would normally be on the horizon has been driven by another key factor: artificial intelligence. His company, Nvidia, emerged from his fascination with images and how to represent them graphically on screen, but the advance of technology has found him in the right place to propel his company to the next level. Developing applications like those created by OpenAI requires high-powered processors, something that Huang and his company quickly saw. So they changed their focus so that their products were not only intended to reproduce images, but to process huge amounts of information. If now a company is looking for a solution to solve this problem, then they can now use artificial intelligence to process large amounts of information. software It is capable of answering any question a user asks out loud, thanks in part to its processors.

That AI boom has made Nvidia one of the biggest tech companies today, and Huang one of the richest people. Earlier this year, Forbes magazine ranked him 11th on its list of billionaires, with an estimated net worth of $119 billion. A rise that, coupled with the recognizable image he has cultivated over the years, has led him to become an example of success and entrepreneurship in the United States and Asia.

Now, Huang rubs shoulders with the tech giants, who treat him as an equal, like Zuckerberg with his praise, or those recently directed by Elon Musk at the social network he now runs, X. “He has absolutely the right attitude,” commented the founder of Tesla, sharing an interview in which Huang boasted of having established a horizontal organization at Nvidia. “No task is too menial for me,” he commented in it. “Remember that I have been a dishwasher, that I have cleaned bathrooms. Life is like that,” he concluded.

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