Washing dishes at Denny's to rockstar of AI, the rise and fall of Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang’s career is presented as a rise from immigrant teenager working at Denny’s to the leader and public face of the AI boom. Born in Taiwan, he moved to the US at 10, studied electrical engineering, and co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with two fellow engineers after a meeting at a Denny’s. The company first made graphics chips for personal computers, then became central to artificial intelligence as researchers discovered that its graphics processing units could handle the massive parallel calculations AI requires. Nvidia’s chips, linked through its systems and supported by its CUDA software, helped power milestones such as the neural network AlexNet and later services including ChatGPT.

Huang’s engineering knowledge, relentless drive and skill with customers, investors and political leaders helped make Nvidia the dominant supplier in a technology boom that drove its valuation as high as $5tn. His fortune and celebrity grew alongside the company, and industry figures praised his unusual ability to communicate. Yet accounts also describe a volatile side: one biographer recalls Huang reacting with intense anger to questions about AI’s effects on jobs. The profile ends with his resignation as CEO following allegations of affairs, including an alleged relationship with a Chinese spy and one with an Nvidia executive. The contrast between his decades of business success and the personal scandal that abruptly ended his leadership frames the story as both a technology triumph and a dramatic fall.