Jensen Huang is everywhere. You can't scroll through a tech feed without seeing that black leather jacket. It's become a uniform, like Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck or Elizabeth Holmes’… well, you get the point. But there’s a massive problem with how we talk about the NVIDIA CEO. Most people see the soaring stock price and the trillion-dollar valuation and think this was some sort of overnight success or a lucky pivot into AI. It wasn’t. Not even close.
He’s been doing this for thirty years.
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If you want to understand why Jensen Huang is currently the most influential person in global infrastructure, you have to look past the "Godfather of AI" headlines. You have to look at the guy who cleaned toilets at Denny's and the founder who nearly saw his company go bankrupt three separate times.
The Denny’s Origin Story and Why it Actually Matters
Most billionaire origin stories feel polished. Sanitized. Jensen’s starts at a Denny’s in San Jose. In 1993, he met with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to figure out how to make PC graphics better. They weren't thinking about Large Language Models or autonomous driving. They were thinking about video games.
Huang often credits his time as a dishwasher and waiter for his management style. He’s famously quoted saying he was the best dishwasher Denny’s ever had because he was organized and fast. This isn't just a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" anecdote. It's the root of his obsession with operational efficiency.
When they started NVIDIA, the "3D graphics" market basically didn't exist. They were trying to build hardware for a software ecosystem that hadn't been written yet. It was a massive gamble. Honestly, it's a miracle they survived the mid-90s. Their first chip, the NV1, was technically impressive but a commercial disaster. It used "quadrilateral primitives" instead of the triangles that eventually became the industry standard. They went against the grain, and they lost. Big time.
Jensen Huang and the CUDA Gamble
This is the part everyone misses when they try to explain NVIDIA’s current dominance. In 2006, Jensen Huang introduced CUDA.
It stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture. At the time, Wall Street hated it. Analysts were screaming that Jensen was wasting billions of dollars on a "science project" that nobody asked for. They wanted him to stick to gaming chips for teenagers playing World of Warcraft.
But Jensen saw something else.
He realized that a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is basically just a massive parallel processor. While a CPU (Central Processing Unit) is like a few smart professors doing one complex task at a time, a GPU is like thousands of reasonably bright students doing simple math all at once. If you could give researchers a way to program those "students" to do things other than render pixels, you could change the world of computing.
The decade of silence
For nearly ten years, NVIDIA’s stock went sideways. The company spent billions developing CUDA and refining the architecture. Researchers at universities started using it for molecular biology, weather simulation, and oil and gas exploration. But it wasn't a "business" yet.
Then came AlexNet in 2012.
Two researchers used NVIDIA GPUs to win the ImageNet competition, proving that deep learning worked exponentially better on GPUs than on CPUs. Suddenly, the "science project" became the backbone of the AI revolution. Jensen didn't "pivot" to AI in 2023 when ChatGPT came out. He built the foundation for it nearly two decades prior. That’s the difference between a lucky CEO and a visionary one.
A Management Style That Scares People
If you work for Jensen Huang, expect to be pushed. He’s not a "check-in once a month" kind of leader. He famously has about 50 direct reports. In most management textbooks, that’s considered insane. Usually, you’re told to have maybe eight to ten.
Jensen’s logic? He wants to be close to the information. He hates "status updates" and prefers "top of mind" emails where employees just tell him what’s bothering them or what they’re excited about right now.
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He lives in a state of constant paranoia. He’s been known to say that NVIDIA is always "thirty days from going out of business." Even now. Even with a market cap that rivals Apple. This isn't just "fake humble" talk; it's a deep-seated belief that in technology, the moment you feel safe is the moment you’re dead.
- Flat Structure: He bypasses middle management to talk to engineers.
- Zero-Billion Dollar Markets: He looks for markets that don't exist yet, rather than fighting for market share in existing ones.
- No Long-term Planning: He famously avoids the typical five-year plan because the world moves too fast.
What People Get Wrong About the "AI Bubble"
There is a lot of talk about NVIDIA being a bubble. People look at the charts and get dizzy. But Jensen Huang’s argument—one he makes with almost religious fervor—is that we are seeing the "decoupling" of the data center.
For sixty years, we’ve built computers that follow instructions (retrieval-based computing). Jensen argues we are moving to generative computing. Instead of looking up a file, the computer will "reason" and generate the answer. This requires a complete "rip and replace" of the world’s $1 trillion worth of traditional data centers.
Whether he’s right or not is the multi-trillion dollar question. But he’s betting the entire company on the idea that every single data center on earth will eventually be powered by GPUs, not CPUs.
The Geopolitical Tightrope
You can't talk about Jensen Huang without talking about China. It’s a mess. The U.S. government keeps tightening export controls, and NVIDIA keeps having to redesign its chips to stay under those limits. Jensen is caught in the middle. He’s a guy born in Taiwan, raised in the U.S., running a company that relies on a global supply chain that is currently fracturing.
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He’s been surprisingly vocal about it. He’s warned that if China can’t buy American chips, they’ll just build their own, and eventually, they’ll be just as good. It's a rare moment of a tech CEO pushing back against Washington D.C. publicly, but he knows the stakes better than anyone.
The Leather Jacket is a Distraction
Let’s be real. The jacket is a brand. It’s a way to be recognizable in a sea of suits. But the man inside it is obsessed with the physics of computing. If you listen to him speak at GTC (NVIDIA’s annual conference), he doesn't talk about "synergy" or "shareholder value." He talks about "single-threaded performance" and "interconnect bottlenecks."
He is an engineer first.
That’s why he’s survived while so many other 90s tech founders have faded away or moved into venture capital. He still loves the "thing." He still gets excited about a new Blackwell architecture like a kid with a new Lego set.
Lessons You Can Actually Use
So, what do you actually take away from the Jensen Huang story? It’s not "wear leather and you’ll be rich."
- Build for the long game, even when it’s painful. If Jensen had listened to the market in 2008, he would have killed CUDA, and NVIDIA would probably be a mid-sized company making chips for the Nintendo Switch.
- Intellectual honesty is a superpower. When the NV1 failed, he didn't double down out of ego. He pivoted to what worked (triangles), even though it meant admitting they were wrong.
- Stay close to the work. The "50 direct reports" thing might not work for everyone, but the principle of reducing the distance between the CEO and the actual product is something every business owner should study.
How to Track the "Jensen Effect"
If you want to see where the world is going, watch what Jensen Huang is talking about today that sounds like a science project. Right now, that’s "Omniverse" and "Digital Twins." He wants to build a 1:1 digital replica of the physical world so we can simulate everything from factories to the global climate before we actually do anything in reality.
Most people think it’s just a fancy metaverse for robots. But remember what they said about CUDA in 2006.
Jensen Huang didn't just win the AI lottery. He bought every single ticket for twenty years straight, and now the drawing has finally happened. If you’re trying to build something that lasts, stop looking at the stock price and start looking at the 20-year bets.
Next Steps for Understanding NVIDIA’s Future:
- Research the Blackwell Architecture: Look into how this new chip design moves beyond just "more power" and focuses on energy efficiency and liquid cooling.
- Monitor Sovereignty AI: Keep an eye on Jensen’s meetings with world leaders. He is currently pushing the idea that every country needs its own AI infrastructure ("Sovereign AI") so they don't have to rely on U.S. cloud providers.
- Study the Software Moat: Don’t just look at the chips. Look at the library of software (cuDNN, TensorRT) that makes it nearly impossible for developers to switch to competitors like AMD or Intel.