It is a Sunday night in May at Taipei’s Raohe Street Night Market, and a crowd has gathered around a grilled corn stall. The man at the centre of it is wearing a black leather jacket. The queue is long, so he makes the vendor an offer: he will pay for everyone in line if he can skip ahead.
The man is Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, and one of the richest people in the world. In Taiwan, where he was born, crowds follow him from restaurant to restaurant. Fans have a name for it: “Jensanity”.
It is a long way from where he started.
A boarding school in Kentucky
Jen-Hsun Huang was born in Taipei on February 17, 1963. His family later moved to Thailand, where his father worked at an oil refinery. His mother, determined that her sons learn English, picked 10 random words from the dictionary for them to learn each day.
When Huang was 9, political unrest in Thailand led his parents to send him and his older brother to relatives in Washington state. Those relatives sent the boys to the Oneida Baptist Institute, a boarding school in rural Kentucky. Huang did not yet speak English fluently. He was the youngest student in his class and did cleaning chores at the school.
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Decades later, speaking to Stanford students, he put it plainly: he had cleaned more toilets than all of them combined.
His parents eventually joined their sons in the US and settled in Oregon. As a teenager, Huang worked at Denny’s, an American diner chain, washing dishes, bussing tables and waiting.
“Do you wanna see my homework?”
At 17, Huang enrolled at Oregon State University to study electrical engineering. In his lab class, he noticed a 19-year-old student named Lori Mills.
He has told the story many times. Knowing he looked young, he hoped she would assume he was smart. He walked up to her and asked if she wanted to see his homework, and promised that if they studied together every Sunday, she would get straight As.
At 20, he made her another promise: he would be a CEO by 30. He later admitted he had no idea what he was talking about. Five years after they met, the two married. They have two children, Madison and Spencer, both of whom now work at Nvidia.
His wife and daughter also have a hand in his most famous look. “I’m happy that my wife and my daughter dresses me,” he once said of the leather jacket.
The NVIDIA Story
After graduating in 1984, Huang worked as a chip designer at AMD and then at LSI Logic, and earned a master’s degree from Stanford.
In 1993, on his 30th birthday, he co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The three planned the company over coffee at a Denny’s in San Jose. Denny’s has since marked the booth with a plaque. Huang kept his promise to Lori, with no time to spare.
Nvidia started out making graphics chips for video games. In 1999, it launched the GeForce 256, which it marketed as the world’s first GPU, and went public the same year.
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The decision that would define the company came in 2006. Nvidia launched CUDA, software that let its graphics chips handle general computing tasks. For years, the payoff was modest. Then researchers discovered that Nvidia GPUs were ideal for training AI models.
Riding the AI wave
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, the world suddenly needed far more AI computing power, and Nvidia was best placed to supply it. Its H100 and later Blackwell chips became the backbone of AI data centres.
In October 2025, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a market value of $5 trillion. Huang owns roughly 3.5% of it. Time named him among the “Architects of AI” for its 2025 Person of the Year.
Along the way, he picked up some unusual admirers. Trump once said he had wanted to break up Nvidia, until he got to know Huang. “I said, ‘Look, we’ll break this guy up,’ before I learned the facts of life,” Trump said in July 2025.
“Ample doses of pain and suffering”
Huang’s philosophy of success is shaped by his early years. Speaking at Stanford in 2024, he said one of his great advantages was having very low expectations. People with high expectations, he argued, tend to have low resilience.
“For all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering,” he told the audience. Inside Nvidia, he said, he still uses the phrase “pain and suffering” with “great glee”, because it builds the company’s character.
A rival in the family
Huang’s biggest competitor in AI chips happens to be a relative. AMD CEO Lisa Su is his first cousin. Huang’s mother is the sister of Su’s grandfather, according to Taiwanese genealogist Jean Wu, and Nvidia has confirmed the two are distant relatives.
They did not grow up together and first met at an industry event, well into their careers. “No family dinners,” Su told Bloomberg. “It is an interesting coincidence.”
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There is another twist. Huang once worked at AMD, the company Su now runs. Today, their headquarters in Santa Clara are about a 5-minute drive apart.
The street food billionaire
For all his wealth, Huang is famous for skipping fine dining. A night market trip is a fixture of every visit to Taiwan. In 2024, ahead of the Computex tech show, he strolled through Taipei’s Ningxia Night Market with TSMC founder Morris Chang and Quanta founder Barry Lam.
In May 2026, accompanying Trump on his visit to China, he was photographed eating zhajiangmian, a Beijing noodle dish, on a street in the city’s old Nanluoguxiang area. He has also been spotted at street stalls in Vietnam, Hong Kong and South Korea. At one Taipei restaurant, he signed “Jensen was here” on the toilet tiles.
His India chapter
India has had its own share of Huang moments.
In September 2023, he toured four Indian cities in five days, met tech leaders and researchers, and sat down one-on-one with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss AI. The schedule was so packed that he admitted to getting through entire workdays on spicy masala omelettes and cold coffee. Nvidia announced partnerships with Reliance, Tata and Infosys around the visit.
He returned in October 2024 for Nvidia’s AI Summit in Mumbai, opening his speech with “Hello, Mumbai!” On stage with Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani, he announced a partnership to build AI infrastructure in India. India, he argued, should build its own AI rather than export its data. “India should not export flour to import bread,” he said.
He also shared his favourite Indian dish. Explaining how AI reasoning works, he said some questions need no thinking at all. His favourite Indian food, he said instantly, is chicken biryani.
The China question
Huang has also become one of the tech industry’s most outspoken voices on China.
He has repeatedly praised Chinese AI. In Beijing in July 2025, he called DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi “the best open reasoning models in the world today”. He has argued that the US benefits when those models run on American chips. “America wins when models like DeepSeek and Qwen run best on American infrastructure,” he said.
His boldest remark came in November 2025, when he told the Financial Times: “China is going to win the AI race.” Within hours, he softened it, saying China is “nanoseconds behind America in AI” and that the US must race ahead.
Behind those comments is a business reality. US export curbs have shrunk China’s share of Nvidia’s revenue from over 20% to about 7%. Huang has lobbied hard in Washington to sell more chips there.
The latest chapter
That China push is now at the centre of the biggest crisis of his career.
In late October, the New York Times reported that US intelligence suspected Alice Huang, an executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed, of spying for China, and that she had developed a close relationship with him. On November 8, Huang admitted in an email to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife.
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Nvidia’s board has launched an independent investigation, while saying it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised, and that it still has confidence in him. Trump has called him “an honorable guy”. House Republicans want him to testify before Congress on November 18.
Nvidia’s shares fell 4.27% on Monday, after losing 13% since the first reports.
For a man who has long said that character is forged through hardship, the coming weeks may be his biggest test yet.
Jensen Huang: The man in the leather jacket who built Nvidia’s $5 trillion AI empire