Jensen Huang almost always wears a black leather jacket at public appearances. Almost two weeks ago, the co-founder and CEO of the American semiconductor company Nvidia made an exception when he gave the closing speech at the National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei. He wore a black robe with a blue and white collar and the university’s plum blossom logo.
It was a special day for him too, his parents and brother were in the audience. In his speech, he urged the graduates to pursue their goals with full commitment and “run, not walk”, just like Nvidia had done. “Remember, you either run to eat or not to be eaten, and often there’s no telling which of the two it is.”
For Huang, the speech was a kind of homecoming because he was born in Taiwan. As a child, he emigrated to the USA, where he had an incredible entrepreneurial career. In 1993 he was one of the co-founders of Nvidia and has also been the CEO since the early days. He propelled the company into the premier league of the semiconductor industry, and last week he hit another milestone: Nvidia became the first chipmaker to surpass $1 trillion in market capitalization, entering an illustrious circle: only four others US companies – Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon – currently have 13-figure market caps.
In the meantime, Nvidia’s market value has fallen below the trillion mark again. However, it is still almost three times as high as at the beginning of the year. This has also increased Huang’s personal wealth, on the “Bloomberg Billionaires Index” he is currently listed with assets of around 35 billion dollars.
“Incredible Orders”
The climb into the trillion club has to do with Nvidia being seen as one of the big winners amid the artificial intelligence (AI) craze. The company manufactures computer chips that are particularly well suited for complex AI applications. The launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT language model in November has fueled an arms race in the AI systems industry, and Nvidia is benefiting broadly as the leading chip supplier in the space. The group underscored this recently when it released its quarterly results with a revenue forecast that far exceeded expectations and stunned analysts. Huang said Nvidia is getting “incredible orders” right now.
Certainly not without self-interest, the Nvidia boss hardly misses an opportunity these days to further stoke the hype about AI and present it as a revolution. He called the launch of ChatGPT an “iPhone moment,” a nod to Apple’s once groundbreaking smartphone. In his speech in Taiwan, he described AI as a “rebirth of the computer industry” that brings with it a “golden opportunity”. Over the next decade, a trillion dollars’ worth of traditional computers will be replaced by AI technologies, and Nvidia is the “engine” of AI developers around the world.
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