Jensen Huang spent three decades building AI chip maker Nvidia – and this week saw it become the world's most valuable company
The valuation of Nvidia put it ahead of Microsoft at $3.317trn, before then falling back later this week. But the stockmarket machinations nonetheless cemented the chip maker’s status as only the third ever company to be worth more than $3trn.
All of which begs the question: just who is the man behind the corporation which as recently as five years ago did not even figure in the top 20 of the world’s largest companies? “He’ll always be more interested in whether you could put trillions of transistors on a chip than trillion-dollar valuations.”
Mr Huang now looks back upon the founding of Nvidia and its painful early years as offering valuable lessons in the levels of endurance, indeed suffering, required to build a successful business. Over the next decade or so, Nvidia and its graphic processing unit product line quietly built its position in the gaming and graphics sector, until the point when it one day became clear that the GPUs and an accompanying software infrastructure were uniquely useful for the sort of computing tasks required for the then-niche sector of machine learning and artificial intelligence.