From cleaning toilets to building future: The untold grit behind Nvidia’s Jensen Huang

Before Jensen Huang became the black-leather-jacketed face of the AI revolution and the mastermind behind Nvidia’s $4 trillion juggernaut, he was just a scared 9-year-old kid scrubbing toilets in small-town Kentucky, bullied, homesick and unable to speak English.

Sent from Taiwan to what his uncle believed was a prestigious boarding school in America, Huang instead landed in a facility for troubled youth. Too young to enroll, he bunked at the school but attended classes at a nearby public school, surrounded by the children of tobacco farmers. It was there that Huang learned his first hard lesson in survival, speak less and work harder. That meant cleaning bathrooms after school and weathering isolation.

But rather than breaking him, the experience hardened his resolve. “The ending of the story is I loved the time I was there,” Huang told US broadcaster NPR, recalling how the toughness of those early days shaped him. After reuniting with his parents in Oregon, he raced ahead, finishing college by 20, designing chips at AMD and LSI Logic and eventually co-founding Nvidia in 1993 over breakfast at a Silicon Valley diner.

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Back then, his dream was simple but audacious, build processors that could solve the kind of problems ordinary computers couldn’t. Today, that vision is powering the age of artificial intelligence.

With Big Tech’s insatiable appetite for AI horsepower, Nvidia’s valuation has exploded crossing the $4 trillion mark. Huang’s own net worth now stands at $150 billion, due to his roughly 3.5% stake in the company he helped create from scratch.

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