Jensen Huang has no documented IQ score, and no consistent rumoured number follows him either. What's on record is three decades of betting a company on where computing was going.
A childhood measured in moves
17 February 1963. His father was a chemical engineer, his mother a teacher who taught him English from a dictionary.
The family relocated to Bangkok for his father's work.
With political unrest in Thailand, he and his brother were sent to relatives in the US, who enrolled them at the Oneida Baptist Institute, a boarding school that also took troubled teenagers. His daily chore was cleaning the toilets.
His parents joined them near Portland. He became a nationally ranked junior table-tennis player.
Dishwasher, busboy and waiter; he later said the job taught him humility and hard work.
Education, one step at a time
Four schools, the last one finished at night while designing chips by day.
Two years at a rural school with strict discipline and older, rougher classmates.
Skipped two grades in Oregon public schools.
Met his wife Lori as his lab partner; he now funds OSU's supercomputing research centre.
Studied part-time in the evenings while designing chips at LSI Logic, after starting at AMD.
Four bets, two points of view
Flip between what outsiders saw at the time and the bet Huang was actually making.
Another PC-graphics start-up in a crowded field of dozens, and its first product, NV1, flopped.
A marketing term for a new GeForce card.
An expensive side project that raised chip costs and didn't sell more games.
Researchers using gaming cards for an academic contest.
What NVIDIA shipped under him
Sources
- NVIDIA corporate history and annual reports
- Oregon State University news releases on the Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex
- Krizhevsky, Sutskever & Hinton (2012). ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
- Stanford GSB View From The Top interview with Jensen Huang (2024)
- What's Your IQ editorial review of circulated figures