Pablo Scarpellini Los Angeles (USA)

Los Angeles (USA)

Updated Saturday, February 24, 2024-01:37

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Earning $9.5 billion in a single day is not within everyone's reach.

There are few called to that table.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, is one of them.

The brutal performance of his company in the last decade has not only made him one of the richest men in the world but has also triggered interest in his figure.

Many are wondering today

who is the leather biker jacket executive

who has installed himself at the epicenter of the industry of the moment: artificial intelligence.

Jim Cramer, the celebrated CNBC host and financial analyst

, says Huang is a once-in-a-generation visionary, a genius who has managed to go

further than Elon Musk,

the CEO of Tesla and Space , in itself, an industrial revolution," he said after Nvidia presented the best financial results in its history on Wednesday, with a 769% increase in its net profit.

overwhelming dominance

Huang used clairvoyance to realize, before anyone else, that his microprocessors intended for graphics design could be used to train artificial intelligence systems.

Today

the dominance of his company in that market segment is overwhelming.

Everyone, even the big tech giants that are competing fiercely to gain a foothold in AI, has to go through Nvidia, its GPU chips, and the multi-billion dollar ecosystem it has created around it.

It has competition, such as AMD and Intel, but the difference at the moment is abysmal.

Nvidia offices in TaiwanRITCHIE B. TONGOEFE

The proof is in its dizzying rise.

Nvidia shares have soared 20,000% in a decade and 500% in the last 18 months.

And with them, Huang's fortune, who controls 3.5% of the shares of the company he founded with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. He was 30 years old at the time and between the three of them they did not even have $40,000 to start the business. company.

Today he is 61 years old and has a

net worth of around $69 billion.

Story of improvement

His is another story of improvement and persistence.

Huang comes from nothing, to

parents who emigrated from Taiwan to Thailand in the 1970s and from there to the United States.

In fact, young Jen-Hsun – his original first name – emigrated with his brother to Oregon when he was only 9 years old.

His parents sent him to live with an uncle and a year later he ended up living in a kind of religious reform school in Kentucky.

That was a miscalculation by his uncle, convinced that the center was a prestigious boarding school.

But Huang remembers it as an enriching experience.

He helped him become tougher surrounded by illiterate farmers' children and peers who constantly made fun of

him for his Asian origin and his appearance.

He was the smartest in the class and ended up gaining his sympathy.

Academic precocity

A couple of years later, his parents obtained the papers to emigrate to the United States and Huang returned to Oregon to finish

high school.

He was so good at math and science that

he finished two years early, at 16,

and started college as the youngest in the class.

"He looked like he was twelve years old," he recalls in an interview with

The New Yorker.

Annabelle Chih Bloomberg

His precocity was not an impediment to conquering one of the few girls in the electrical engineering course at Oregon State University.

"There were about 250 students in the course and maybe three girls,"

she recalls.

Lori Mills was seduced by her ability to pass subjects with ease.

Tattooed Nvidia

They moved to Silicon Valley, and while Huang was working for AMD—now a competitor of Nvidia—and doing a master's degree at Stanford, he came up with the idea of ​​opening his own company.

"We believed that this computing model could solve problems that traditional computing was not capable of,"

he said in 2017. Almost three decades later he is still talking about the same thing, a patient monopolist.

"I've barely had to change my presentations."

Today he hands out thousand-dollar tips at the same restaurant

where he worked in his college days, Denny's, and has his company's logo tattooed, keeping his promise to do so if Nvidia's stock rose above $100.

Now they are close to 800, which places it as

the third most valuable company in the United States and the fourth worldwide.

Only Microsoft and Apple are worth more.