The spectacular rise and fall of Jensen Huang, the man behind an AI empire

The photo with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that Alice Huang (left) used on her WeChat profile. (via Financial Times)

At a fried chicken restaurant in Seoul’s Gangnam District on Oct. 30 last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, 63, clinked beer glasses in a toast with Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chairman Chung Eui-sun. 

A huge crowd had gathered outside the joint.

Huang’s immense global popularity came with the advent of the artificial intelligence era. Often greeted with cheers whenever making a public appearance in his signature black leather jacket, he resigned in disgrace as CEO on Thursday amid allegations of infidelity.

The man who spent 33 years building his AI empire has rattled the very foundation of the company he built from the ground up.

His life is the quintessential success story of the American immigrant. Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1963, he moved to Bangkok, Thailand, at age 5, but his parents sent him and his older brother to the US when Huang was 9, after a military coup in the Land of Smiles led to political instability.

Two years later, his parents joined their sons in the US and settled in Oregon. Due to financial difficulty, he began working at the restaurant chain Denny’s at age 15 as a dishwasher and waiter.

Showing exceptional academic aptitude, Huang graduated from high school two years early at 16. He went on in 1984 to earn a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master’s in the same major in 1992 from Stanford University.

While a student, he also worked on microprocessor design at the semiconductor companies LSI Logic and AMD.

A major turning point in Huang’s life occurred with a decision he made in 1992 at a Denny’s in Silicon Valley. Then 30, he launched Nvidia, a graphics semiconductor company, with two other engineers.

Predicting that 3D graphics would go mainstream, Huang set out to turn his ambitious dream into reality: creating a chip that could render such graphics quickly with high precision for games played on personal computers.

His company nearly went bankrupt after its initial product failed, but barely survived thanks to a lifeline: a US$5 million investment from the Japanese gaming giant Sega.

Nvidia put itself on firm ground with its 1997 release of the graphics chip Riva 128, which sold a million units in just four months. Two years later, the company launched the GeForce 256, the world’s first graphics processing unit (GPU).

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (center) poses for a photo with Samsung’s Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai Motor Group’s Chung Eui-sun after having a meal of fried chicken and beer at a chicken joint in Seoul’s Samseong neighborhood on Oct. 30, 2025. (pool photo)

Yet the real watershed came seven years later. Discovering that GPUs could also be used to perform complex scientific calculations, in 2006 Huang launched CUDA, a software platform allowing the use of GPUs in general-purpose computing, investing massive capital into it over an extended period.

This bold gamble had no guarantee of a return, but the 2022 debut of ChatGPT, the world’s first generative AI chatbot, changed everything.

Companies launching AI development lined up to secure Nvidia semiconductors. Last year alone, Nvidia’s market cap consecutively broke global records by surpassing US$4 trillion and then US$5 trillion.

More than just a semiconductor mogul, Huang earned recognition as a major figure shaping global AI. Amid the Sino-US competition in technology, he held talks with President Donald Trump on easing export restrictions on China, while also maintaining Nvidia’s relationships with Chinese companies.

The Taiwan-born American entrepreneur thus served as a “tech ambassador,” going back and forth between the US and China.

Huang oversaw technological research and development and business strategy, with over 60 executives reporting directly to him. This concentration of power and decision-making authority led to the assessment that “he is Nvidia.”

Yet this absolute rule eventually came back to haunt his trillion-dollar company.

Nvidia faces the greatest crisis in its history following Huang’s resignation as CEO, a position he held for 33 years, amid allegations that he had three extramarital affairs. One of his mistresses is reportedly a Chinese woman suspected of having ties to Chinese intelligence.

“The biggest issue is no human goes on forever, and this is exactly why you want a good succession plan in place if something like this were to happen,” said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert and former University of Delaware professor, to the US news outlet Axios. “You can’t base a company that big around one person. You just can’t.”