Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang named Time’s most influential

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made Nvidia the most valuable chip company in the United States. She is a pioneer in both graphics and artificial intelligence technology. And now the awards are updating him, as he was named one of the 100 most influential people in Time magazine.

On Nov. 18, he will also receive the chip industry’s top honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award. These recognitions for Huang, as well as for others who formed the Time list (Tesla founder Elon Musk, and Apple CEO Tim Cook), show the importance that the technologies his company has built they have become for the world.

“Artificial intelligence is transforming our world,” computer scientist Andrew Ng wrote in Huang’s story. “The software that allows computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on the hardware that made Jensen Huang possible.”

Above: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is one of Time’s 100 most influential people for 2021.

Image credit: Time

Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as CEO since its inception. Huang showed me a demonstration of the company’s graphics chip and its “Windows Accelerator” application. That’s when I was in the San Jose Mercury News in 1995, and was Huang’s first press interview).

Rapid innovations in 3D gaming hardware were an important part of why it became the world’s largest entertainment industry. More recently, Nvidia took advantage of the parallel processing it used for its graphics processing units (GPUs) to perform non-graphics computing tasks. This became a great application in AI, where Nvidia chips are becoming the brains of computers, robots, and autonomous cars.

In the more than 25 years since the company’s first chip, the complexity of the scene in computer graphics has increased about 500 million times, Huang said. Moore’s Law, which predicts that chip performance will double every couple of years, would have increased only 100,000 times in the same period if it were not helped by better chip design.

This relentless innovation has borne fruit. Nvidia is now worth $ 555 billion in the stock market and employs 20,000 people. Much of this growth occurred when Nvidia saw great success in AI.

“Huang’s bet paid off largely because he is among the most technical CEOs in the world,” Ng wrote. “He is also a compassionate manager of his employees and a generous supporter of science and technology education. With AI technologies still emerging, an insatiable appetite for more calculation is created, Huang’s team is well positioned. to continue to drive technological advances over the coming decades ”.

Let’s move on to the metaverse

Above: Jensen Huang is CEO of Nvidia. He gave a virtual lecture at the recent GTC event.

Image credit: Nvidia

Huang is also a fan of the intersection of science fiction and technology and has recently been talking more about the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are interconnected, as in novels such as Snow Crash i Ready Player One.

Huang is the recipient of the IEEE Founder’s Medal; the Dr. Exemplary Leadership Award Morris Chang; and honorary doctorate degrees from Chiao Tung National University of Taiwan, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. In 2019, Harvard Business Review ranked him No. 1 on the list of the 100 best-performing CEOs in the world during the life of his tenure. In 2017 he was appointed Fortunebusinessman of the year.

Prior to founding Nvidia, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He has a BSEE from Oregon State University and an MSEE from Stanford University.

Above: Jensen Huang in his early years as an engineer.

Image credit: Nvidia / CIE

Recently, he also received a distinguished award for his career for the Asian American Engineer of the Year from the Chinese Institute of Engineers (CIE) group. Huang noted that he was “destined to be an engineer,” since his father was an engineer in Taiwan. His siblings were engineers and his wife, Lori, whom he met as a sophomore at Oregon State University, is also an engineer.

In his CIE acceptance speech, Huang made a rare comment on Nvidia’s business issues, pointing to the scourge of recent anti-Asian violence: “Racism is a steering wheel that we must stop.”