Who is billionaire Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia – 02/25/2024 – Market

The fortune of Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s executive president, doubled in eight months and reached US$69.6 billion (R$347.6 billion) last week after a sharp rise in the company’s shares driven by the results for 2023, released in Wednesday (21).

Nvidia shares have appreciated by around 238% in the last 12 months, 63% this year alone. With this, the company positions itself above Amazon and Alphabet, owner of Google, and has almost US$2 trillion in market value, the third most valuable in the United States.

Huang, 61, is the company’s largest individual shareholder, with 3.5% of shares, according to Forbes. The magazine’s ranking, based on information on public assets, placed the executive in 21st place among the richest people in the world this Saturday (24).

In 2007, Huang led Nvidia’s expansion beyond video game graphics, the sector on which it based its reputation until a few years ago. This advancement was what allowed the current dominance in the hardware market focused on artificial intelligence.

In recent years, the company has designed and launched graphics processing units (GPU) that have been fundamental to the development of generative AI, whose recent boom is marked by the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. The chips are produced by Taiwanese TSMC.

According to the Financial Times, Nvidia’s co-founder is your standard Silicon Valley hard-working entrepreneur. He wakes up at 4am, exercises and heads to a 14-hour work routine.

The rest of Huang’s time is dedicated to his two daughters and his wife, Lori, whom he met through a group work at the University of Oregon. There, the executive completed his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He also has a master’s degree from Stanford.

Huang founded the company at age 30 in 1993 with two friends after leaving jobs as chip designers. They chose the games market due to the constant challenge posed by the computer graphics area, which demands research and implementation solutions. Huang says this difficulty made the company move forward.

The billionaire almost always dresses in black clothes, from shoes to shirt, underneath a dark, well-hydrated leather jacket. He also likes sports cars — he has Ferraris, a Koenigsegg super sports car and a Mercedes.

Despite Huang’s preference for stripped-down accessories, a friend told the Financial Times that he likes sports cars not for their speed on the track, but for their cool look. Among investors, Huang is known for looking at a five- to 10-year horizon.

In an interview with the website Wired published on Friday (23), Huang gave signs of what he expects for the future of technology.

“If it’s possible to generate text, if it’s possible to generate images, is it also possible to generate movement? The answer is probably yes. And so, if it’s possible to generate movement, it will be possible to understand intentions and produce a general version of articulation. So, humanoid robotics must be very close,” he said.

“A foundational model of robotics is probably on the horizon — I’d say sometime next year. From that point on, five years from now, we’re going to see some amazing things.”

Before today’s AI frenzy, Huang led Nvidia through different cryptocurrency crises since 2018 that affected the company’s performance.

In addition to games and AI models, GPUs are also used in mining these digital assets, although Nvidia has tried to separate itself from this market.

In 2022, Nvidia launched the H100 processor, aimed at running language models — the engines that run ChatGPT, for example — with trillions of parameters. Each unit costs up to US$40,000 (around R$200,000), according to specialized websites.

Companies interested in competing in the artificial intelligence market face this price to set up the necessary infrastructure for the business.

The debut of this chip on the market at a time when inflation was rising in the US seemed poorly timed, but it occurred weeks before the launch of ChatGPT, in November 2022.

Some customers have had to wait months in order to access a thousand H100 processors to train large language models. Elon Musk told the Financial Times that a server — which requires several chips — capable of training AI currently costs at least US$250 million (R$1.25 billion).

Today, the wait reaches 210 days (or seven months), said Nvidia’s director for Latin America, Márcio Aguiar, in an interview with Sheet.

“The published results are still small, the AI ​​market involves more than US$ 1 trillion (R$ 4.9 trillion)”, he said.

The company has so far presented the best results in capitalizing on the optimism surrounding artificial intelligence, a technology that promises to increase productivity and could threaten millions of jobs.

“We have come from a very difficult year in 2022 to a surprising turnaround,” Huang told the Financial Times in May last year.

Last week, following the announcement of record revenue of $60.9 billion in 2023, Nvidia’s CEO said that “demand is increasing around the world,” and generative AI has reached “a tipping point.”

_{With Financial Times}