Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has been its chief executive and president ever since. Forbes puts his fortune at more than $203 billion as of October 2, 2026, after Nvidia shares hit a record high that Friday. He owns roughly 4% of the company, which he took public in 1999.
The start was a lot harder than the money suggests.
Taiwan, Thailand, then a Kentucky mix-up
Huang was born in Taiwan and moved to Thailand as a child. When civil unrest grew there, his family sent him and his brother to the United States. What happened next, Forbes says, was a clerical disaster: his aunt and uncle mistook a rural Kentucky boarding school for a prep school. It was actually a school for troubled youth.
Huang was assigned to clean the boys’ bathroom every day after class. His brother was sent to work on the tobacco farm. He also worked as a waiter at Denny’s, which he says helped him overcome his shyness.
From a Kentucky bathroom to a $5 trillion company
He went on to study engineering, earning a bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University and a master’s from Stanford. Nvidia’s chips first dominated computer gaming. Then came artificial intelligence, and under Huang the company’s GPUs became the standard there too. That run pushed Nvidia’s market value past $5 trillion in 2025.
Forbes classes him as self-made, giving him a self-made score of 8, and lists his source of wealth as Nvidia. He is 63, a United States citizen, married, and lives in Los Altos, California.
Giving back to his schools
He has given Stanford $30 million for an engineering center. In 2022 he gave $50 million to Oregon State University for a research center that carries his name. Forbes has counted him on its lists 25 times.
Recent Forbes headlines show how much attention he draws. In September the magazine ran a piece on his claim that AGI has arrived, arguing it reflects the business value of AI more than proof of human-level intelligence. A report in late October said Trump was briefed on an alleged Chinese intelligence plot involving Huang and took no action, according to The New York Times as relayed by Forbes. And in early September, Forbes reported that Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face for almost $13 billion; Huang said the company would remain an “open platform for the entire AI ecosystem.”
