Jensen Huang is the Co-Founder and long-serving CEO of NVIDIA, the US-based semiconductor firm best known for its GPUs that have become integral to AI computing. But who is he and why does he deserve the accolade of the Financial Times’ Person of the Year 2025?
Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963 and spent parts of his childhood there, as well as Thailand, before his family moved to the United States. There, he earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State University and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Before entering the semiconductor industry, Huang worked at a Denny’s restaurant as a dish washer, busboy, and waiter. Huang has often spoken about that experience and how that early job taught him to value all types of work and helped shape his work ethic later in his career.
After graduating, Huang worked in microchip design and engineering roles at AMD and LSI Logic before co-founding NVIDIA in 1993 with his two colleagues Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. He became the company’s CEO and a board member from its inception. The aim was to build specialised processors for graphics and accelerated computing.
Under his leadership, NVIDIA’s invention of the GPU in 1999 helped drive the growth of the PC gaming market and establish parallel computing architectures that later became foundational for modern AI workloads. Huang guided the company’s expansion from graphics into high-performance computing and deep learning.
NVIDIA continues to launch new hardware and software platforms targeted at AI acceleration within Cloud, Edge, and datacentres. The company’s AI hardware platforms, especially Blackwell AI GPUs, and its CUDA software ecosystem, have become foundational to many major AI models and computational workloads worldwide.
He has received multiple industry honours, including election to the National Academy of Engineering, the IEEE Founder’s Medal, the Robert N. Noyce Award, and honorary doctorates from several universities. Harvard Business Review ranked him among the world’s best-performing CEOs, and he was featured on TIME’s 100 most influential people list, as well as more recently a member of TIME’s Person of the Year 2025.
During his tenure, NVIDIA has grown into one of the world’s most valuable companies, with its GPUs widely used across sectors including AI research, autonomous systems, scientific computing, and Cloud data centres. In October 2025, NVIDIA’s market value climbed beyond $5 trillion. The move made it the first company in history to cross the $5 trillion threshold, reinforcing its dominance in the AI semiconductor market.
Huang’s influence extends far beyond NVIDIA. His leadership has helped shape semiconductor roadmaps as frequent architecture updates influence how the wider industry considers interconnects, specialised accelerators, and data-centric design. This influence has stretched into policy discussions where Huang’s comments on skills, manufacturing, and industrial capability has fed into broader debates on national competitiveness.
He has also become a prominent public voice in discussions about the AI economy. His regular keynote addresses frame expectations around AI deployment, investment requirements, and the long-term trajectory of data-driven systems.
All in all, “the NVIDIA chief executive has been the driving force behind the massive AI boom which has the capacity to reshape the global economy,” the Financial Times said.
