Nvidia's Jensen Huang, The Scandal-Hit AI Visionary In A Leather Jacket

Chips made by US chip titan Nvidia push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, but its leader Jensen Huang is in the spotlight over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

Unknown to the public just four years ago, the 63-year-old is a powerful entrepreneur, drawing stadium crowds as he presents cutting-edge components essential to the development of AI tools like ChatGPT.

Media reports last week said US intelligence officials believe Huang grew close to a Chinese executive who was funneling information to Beijing.

Nvidia's board said on Sunday it had opened a probe into the CEO and co-founder, who acknowledged having been unfaithful to his wife and said he was "deeply sorry."

Big tech's insatiable appetite for chips designed by Nvidia, known as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), has catapulted the California chipmaker to a market valuation of $4.5 trillion, among the world's largest.

Its meteoric rise has made Huang one of the world's richest people -- worth around $160 billion, according to Forbes -- thanks to the roughly four percent stake he holds in the company he founded three decades ago with two friends in a Silicon Valley diner.

He has become a close informal adviser on AI to Donald Trump, traveling with the US president on Air Force One on a trip to Beijing earlier this year.

That is an area of concern to US officials who believe he has been involved with the alleged spy, Alice Huang, who is linked to a Singapore-based data center company, according to the New York Times. 

Despite their shared surname, the pair are not related.

- Early life -

Born in Taipei in 1963, Jensen Huang -- originally named Jen-Hsun -- embodies the American success story.

At nine years old, he was sent away with his brother to boarding school in small-town Kentucky.

His uncle recommended the school to his Taiwanese parents believing it to be a prestigious institution, though it was actually a school for troubled youth.

Too young to be a student, Huang boarded there but attended a nearby public school alongside the children of tobacco farmers. With his poor English, he was bullied and forced to clean toilets -- a two-year ordeal that transformed him.

"We worked really hard, we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough," he recounted in an interview with US broadcaster NPR.

But "the ending of the story is I loved the time I was there," Huang said.

Brought home by his parents who had by then settled in the northwestern US state of Oregon, he graduated from university at just 20 and joined AMD, then LSI Logic, to design chips -- his passion.

But he wanted to go further and founded Nvidia in 1993 to "solve problems that normal computers can't," using semiconductors powerful enough to handle 3D graphics, he said during an interview on the "No Priors" podcast.

- 'As fast as we can' -

Nvidia created the first GPU in 1999, riding the intersection of video games, data centers, cloud computing and now generative AI.

Always dressed in a black T-shirt and leather jacket, Huang sports a Nvidia logo tattoo and has a taste for sports cars.

One former high-ranking Nvidia employee described him to AFP as "the most driven person" he'd ever met.

He has rejected calls to deliberately slow down AI development even as some insiders warn the technology could threaten human existence within a decade.

"That kind of narrative is dramatic, it gets a lot of attention," but "it's not grounded on facts," he told CBS News in September.

"We should go as fast as we can" on AI, but labs should not release products that are not safe, he said.

- Street food -

On visits to his native Taiwan, Huang is treated like a megastar, with fans crowding him for autographs and selfies as journalists follow him to the barber shop and his favorite night market.

"He has created the phenomena because of his personal charm," noted Wayne Lin of Witology Market Trend Research Institute.

"A person like him must be very busy and his schedule should be full every day meeting big bosses. But he remembers to eat street food when he comes to Taiwan," he said, calling Huang "unusually friendly."

Over the years, Nvidia has taken care to project a drama-free image of Huang.

But the former employee painted a more nuanced picture, describing a "very paradoxical" individual fiercely protective of his employees but also capable, within Nvidia's executive circle, of "ripping people to shreds" over major mistakes or poor choices.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)