London, 15 November 2026 — EBM Weekend Read — By Nick Staunton
Last Thursday, Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang had resigned as chief executive and left its board, ending a 33-year tenure at the company he co-founded. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is now interim CEO, according to Nvidia’s filing. The shares fell more than 14% at one point before recovering some ground.
The ending is messy. The career that came before it is one of the most remarkable in business history. Huang took a graphics-chip start-up founded in a roadside diner and turned it into the most valuable company in the world, the engine of the AI boom and, for a time, the closest thing the technology industry had to a single point of failure. Here is how he did it.
The Early Years
Huang was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1963. At around nine, his parents sent him and his brother to the United States, where they ended up at a rural boarding school in Kentucky. It was a hard start, and he has spoken since about cleaning toilets there. The family later settled in Oregon, where he excelled at school, competed at national level in table tennis and, as a teenager, worked as a dishwasher and waiter at Denny’s.
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SubscribeHe studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University, graduating in 1984, and later took a master’s at Stanford. In between, he designed microprocessors at AMD and then worked at LSI Logic, a chip company where he learned how semiconductor businesses were run.
The Denny’s Meeting
In 1993, Huang, then 30, met two engineers from Sun Microsystems, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, at a Denny’s in San Jose. Their idea was that personal computers would one day need dedicated chips to draw 3D graphics, starting with video games. They founded Nvidia in April 1993 with about $40,000 between them, and Huang became chief executive.
The early years nearly killed the company. Its first chip, the NV1, launched in 1995 and flopped, because it was built on a graphics approach the industry rejected. Nvidia came close to running out of money. Huang laid off staff, scrapped the design and bet what was left on a new chip, the RIVA 128, in 1997. It sold about a million units in four months and saved the company.
The Breakthrough
In 1999, Nvidia listed on the Nasdaq and launched the GeForce 256, which it marketed as the world’s first GPU, or graphics processing unit. Its importance went far beyond gaming. A GPU performs thousands of simple calculations at the same time, while a conventional processor (CPU) works through tasks largely one after another. For drawing pixels, that parallel design was ideal. Huang was among the first to see it could do much more.
The Vision
The bet that defined his career came in 2006, when Nvidia released CUDA, software that let scientists and programmers use its graphics chips for general computing. It cost Nvidia heavily for years, and Wall Street saw little point in it. Huang kept investing anyway, arguing that what he called “accelerated computing” would eventually change everything.
He was proved right in 2012. A team of researchers in Toronto trained an image-recognition network, AlexNet, on two Nvidia gaming cards and beat every rival by a wide margin. Deep learning had found its hardware. Huang moved Nvidia towards data centres and AI long before most of the industry understood why.
When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Nvidia was the only company with both the chips and the software ecosystem ready. Demand exploded. Nvidia passed a trillion-dollar valuation in 2023 and became the first company to reach $5tn in 2025, a scale even Elon Musk’s empire has struggled to match. Every frontier AI lab, hyperscaler and neocloud depended on its GPUs. The SoftBank and Kioxia sell-off showed how far its swings now reach.
Was He a Genius?
On strategy, the record speaks for itself. Huang spent more than a decade building for a market that didn’t yet exist. CUDA’s lock-in remains Nvidia’s deepest moat, because the world’s AI software is written for it. He ran the company with an unusually flat structure, with dozens of direct reports, and he survived several near-death moments, including the 2008 crash and the crypto collapse of 2022.
There are fair caveats. Luck played a part: the deep learning breakthrough happened to suit hardware Nvidia already made. Critics have long questioned Nvidia’s financing of the customers that buy its chips, and the circular nature of some AI deals. As we noted in our coverage of the Wall Street rally, the AI trade’s dependence on one company was always a risk. Genius is fair for the vision. Whether the empire was built on sustainable demand is a question that will outlast him.
What Happened Lately
The fall came quickly. Nvidia’s shares had already dropped about 22% from their October record when the scandal broke. Earlier this month, Huang publicly admitted to being unfaithful to his wife and apologised to his family and staff. Further reports followed about his relationships, including allegations involving a former executive at a Singapore-based company said to have worked for Chinese intelligence, according to Al Jazeera. Nvidia’s board has launched an independent investigation and says it has no reason to believe national security was compromised. US lawmakers are now seeking answers, including over Nvidia’s sales of H200 chips to China, which President Trump approved last December.
The board is searching for a permanent successor. Quarterly earnings are due on Tuesday.
Where I Land
Huang’s legacy will survive this week. He saw, earlier and more clearly than anyone, that the chip built to render video games could power artificial intelligence, and he stuck with that bet for years when nobody else believed in it. That is rare in any industry.
But Nvidia’s value was always partly a bet on the man in the leather jacket. Investors are about to find out how much of that $5tn belonged to the company and how much to its founder. For Europe, which has no Nvidia of its own despite all the talk of European tech investment, the lesson is clear: the most important company in the AI economy is now looking for a leader.
