Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang in 2023. Photo: 總統府 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Jensen Huang has run Nvidia since the day it was founded, a stretch of more than 30 years that took the company from a startup selling graphics chips for video games to the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. In October 2025, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the milestone, Nvidia became the first public company to pass a $5 trillion market capitalization.
From Taipei to Silicon Valley
Huang was born on Feb. 17, 1963, in Taipei, Taiwan, and spent part of his childhood in Thailand. At age 9 he was sent to the United States. In 1973 he arrived in Tacoma, Washington, and was enrolled at a boarding school in Kentucky. His parents later settled in Beaverton, Oregon.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984. A master’s degree in the same field followed from Stanford University in 1992, completed while he worked as a chip designer.
Building Nvidia
In 1993 Huang co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The three met at a Denny’s restaurant in East San Jose, California. Huang became president and chief executive, and he has held that role ever since.
Nvidia built its early business on graphics processing units, or GPUs, the chips that draw images on a screen. Over time the same parallel design proved useful for other heavy computing jobs, and the company expanded into high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Those markets drove the growth that followed. Nvidia’s market value first reached $3 trillion in June 2024, and it crossed $5 trillion sixteen months later.
Huang has drawn wide recognition along the way. He was named to the Time 100 list in 2021 and 2024 and to the Time 100 AI list in 2023 and 2024. Among his honors are the IEEE Founders Medal in 2020, the VinFuture Prize in 2024 and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2025. Time also counted him among the “Architects of AI” for its 2025 Person of the Year issue.
What it means locally
Nvidia is based in California, and Huang has no documented tie to Evanston that this reporter could confirm. The company’s reach is still felt in any place that does serious computing or manages investment money. Researchers at universities, including those in Illinois, increasingly rely on GPU-based systems for machine learning and simulation work, and the supply and price of those chips shape what a lab can attempt.
For investors in the Chicago area, the company’s size matters mainly because of how much of the broad stock market now sits in a handful of technology names. A company worth $5 trillion carries real weight in the index funds that many retirement accounts hold, so its swings can show up in portfolios whether or not an investor ever chose to buy the stock. Anyone weighing that exposure would do well to check the holdings of their own funds.
Huang, now in his early 60s, remains one of the longest-serving chief executives of a major American technology company, having led the same firm from its founding through every stage of its growth.
Biographical details are drawn from Wikipedia’s entry on Jensen Huang.
Thomas Brennan covers property taxes, real estate, transit and the local economy for The Evanston Edge.
