Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang named one of Time’s most influential people

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made Nvidia America’s most valuable chip company. He is a pioneer in graphics and artificial intelligence technologies. And now the awards are catching up with him, as he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

On November 18, he will also receive the chip industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award. These recognitions for Huang – as well as others who have been on Time’s list (Tesla founder Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook) – show just how great the technologies his company has developed are. that have become important to the world.

“Artificial intelligence is transforming our world,” computer scientist Andrew Ng wrote in the article on Huang. “The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on the hardware made possible by Jensen Huang. “

Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has been its CEO since its inception. (Huang showed me a demonstration of the company’s graphics chip and its “Windows Accelerator” application. This was when I was at the San José Mercury News in 1995, and it was Huang’s first press interview).

The rapid innovations of 3D hardware for games have largely contributed to it becoming the largest entertainment industry in the world. More recently, Nvidia has used the parallel processing it uses for its graphics processing units (GPUs) to perform non-graphics compute tasks. It has turned into a huge application in AI, where Nvidia’s chips become the brains of computers, robots and self-driving cars.

In the 25 years since the company’s first chip, the complexity of scenes in computer graphics has increased by about 500 million times, Huang said. Moore’s Law, which predicts that chip performance will double every two years, would have increased only 100,000 times over the same period without the help of better chip design.

This relentless innovation has paid off. Nvidia is now worth $ 555 billion on the stock market and employs 20,000 people. Much of this growth has come as Nvidia has seen huge success in AI.

“Huang’s gamble has largely paid off because he’s one of the most technically savvy CEOs in the world,” Ng wrote. “He is also a compassionate steward of his employees and a generous supporter of science and technology education. With still emerging AI technologies creating an insatiable thirst for more computation, Huang’s team is well positioned to continue driving technological advancements for decades to come.

To the metaverse

Huang is also a fan of the intersection between science fiction and technology and recently spoke more about the Metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, as in novels such as Snow accident and Loan Player One.

Huang is a recipient of the IEEE Founder’s Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorates from National Chiao Tung University of Taiwan, National Taiwan University and Oregon State University. In 2019, Harvard Business Review ranked him # 1 on its list of the 100 Most Successful CEOs in the World during their tenure. In 2017, he was appointed Fortunebusinessman of the year.

Prior to founding Nvidia, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He holds a BSEE from Oregon State University and an MSEE from Stanford University.

He also recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian American Engineer of the Year from the Chinese Institute of Engineers (CIE) group. Huang pointed out that he was “destined to be an engineer” because his father was an engineer in Taiwan. His brothers were engineers and his wife, Lori, whom he met in second year at Oregon State University, is also an engineer.

In his CIE Award acceptance speech, Huang made a rare comment beyond Nvidia’s business, noting the scourge of recent anti-Asian violence: “Racism is a flywheel that we must stop.