From reform-school toilets to $5T: a timeline of Jensen Huang and NVIDIA

tibo_maker · x · 2026-11-13

A long X thread chronicles Jensen Huang's life and NVIDIA's rise in year-by-year form:

Early years: Born in Tainan in 1963; sent to the US at 10, where his uncle unwittingly enrolled him in a Kentucky reform school. His daily job was cleaning toilets; his 17-year-old roommate had knife scars from fights. They taught each other to read and bench press, and Huang became a nationally ranked teenage table tennis player.
Education and early career: Washed dishes at Denny's in high school, skipped two grades, graduated at 16; EE degree from Oregon State in 1984 (lab partner Lori later became his wife); chip design at AMD then LSI Logic; Stanford master's in 1992 while working full time.
Founding NVIDIA: Met Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem at a San Jose Denny's; founded NVIDIA in 1993 at age 30. The NV1 flopped in 1995; in 1996 the Sega chip failed too — he confessed and got $5M from Sega, which he later said was all the money they had, then laid off over half the company (from 100 to 40 people). For years he opened meetings with "our company is 30 days from going out of business."
Turnaround: RIVA 128 sold 1M units in its first 4 months (1997); IPO at $12 in 1999; GeForce 256 billed as the world's first GPU; Microsoft picked NVIDIA for the original Xbox (2000).
CUDA bet and the AI era: CUDA launched 2006; market cap fell below $5B in the 2008 crisis; AlexNet was trained on 2 NVIDIA gaming cards in 2012; in 2016 Huang hand-delivered the first AI supercomputer to a small nonprofit called OpenAI.
Peak: Mellanox acquired for $6.9B (2019); $40B Arm deal killed by regulators (2022); $1T in 2023, $3T and briefly the world's most valuable company in 2024; first ever to $4T (July 2025) and $5T (October 2025).
Cliffhanger: In October 2026 the NYT reported his close ties to a woman US officials suspect is a Chinese spy — NVIDIA called the dealings "not unusual" — and in November three House committee chairs asked him to explain (thread cuts off there).

Original post →

From reform-school toilets to $5T: a timeline of Jensen Huang and NVIDIA

More from Companies & People