33-year reign ends as Jensen Huang resigns: About the long-time Nvidia chief

Jensen Huang has resigned from his position as the CEO, president and board member of Nvidia, a company he started in 1993 and remained at the helm since the beginning. Problems kept piling up for him after he admitted to cheating on his wife on Sunday (Nov 8). The Nvidia board met on Wednesday to discuss ousting him. Huang was also reportedly involved with another woman who reported to him at Nvidia. Huang, an electrical engineer, founded the company that has now exploded in value because of the AI boom. He was not only the CEO, but also the president of Nvidia.

Jensen Huang early life

Huang was born to Taiwanese parents who moved to Thailand when he was five years old. The political situation in the country amid the Vietnam War led his parents to send him and his brother to the United States. He arrived in Washington at the age of nine, where he lived with his relatives. His uncle mistakenly enrolled them at a Baptist school in rural Kentucky, thinking it was an elite institute. But the religious reform school was an institute for troubled youth, and Huang faced extreme bullying here and was forced to clean toilets daily. Two years later, his parents moved to the US and took their children to Oregon.

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Jensen Huang engineering degree

He graduated high school two years early, was a nationally ranked junior table tennis player, and went on to earn a BS in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State University in 1984. This is where he met Lori Mills, his future wife. He also earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1992.

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Huanh co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in San Jose with $40,000 in seed money and became the CEO. The company was on the verge of shutting down after its first graphics chip (NV1) failed. It was saved by the release of the RIVA 128 graphics processor. Nvidia went public on the Nasdaq in January 1999 and launched the GeForce 256 later that year, and called it the world's first Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Huang got the Nvidia logo tattooed on his shoulder after the share price hit $100.

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AI boom and Nvidia

In 2006, he championed CUDA, a software platform allowing developers to use GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing beyond video games. Artificial Intelligence is what ultimately brought Nvidia real limelight after researchers found that CUDA-enabled GPUs were ideal for training deep neural networks. Nvidia became the foundational hardware and software provider for modern artificial intelligence. Nvidia became the first publicly traded company to surpass a $5 trillion market valuation in October 2025.