Yes, but how much can he do on the bench?
While attending Oneida Elementary School in Kentucky, Jensen Huang, president and CEO of ai megamonster Nvidia (NVDA) He made a deal with his roommate.
Related: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just told investors what's next for the ai chip maker
Huang would teach the illiterate student to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press.
“I ended up doing a hundred push-ups every night before going to bed,” he told the newspaper. ai-revolution”>New Yorker.
Huang, who was born in Taiwan, said he was bullied relentlessly during this time, but credited his experience in Oneida with developing his resilience.
“Back then, there was no counselor to talk to,” he said. “Back then, you just had to toughen up and move on.”
He moved on, to Oregon with his parents. Huang graduated from high school two years early, at age 16, and received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1992.
His first job was at Denny's in Portland when he was 15 years old.
“I was a dishwasher, I was a busboy, I waited tables,” Huang said at one company. blog post. “No one can carry more cups of coffee than me.”
And Denny's would play an important role in Huang's life, beyond serving hot cups of coffee and carrying dirty dishes.
Nvidia becomes an ai powerhouse
It was at a Denny's restaurant in San Jose, California, where, in 1993, Huang met with two friends, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, to discuss creating a chip that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers.
Huang said the restaurant, which was just off a busy street in the heart of Silicon Valley, was the perfect place to start a business.
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“I had all the coffee you could drink and no one could kick you out,” he said.
The business the three men started turned out to be Nvidia and Huang has been running the business ever since.
Last year, Huang and Denny's CEO Kelli Valade, who got her first job as a restaurant waitress when she was 16, unveiled a plaque at the Denny's restaurant where Nvidia was born.
The company has entered the artificial intelligence sector in a big way, briefly surpassing Microsoft as the world's most valuable publicly traded company.
Huang has done quite well and even donated $2 million to his former school in Oneida to build a dormitory and classroom building, called Huang Hall, for female students.
There have been setbacks, including reports earlier this month that the chipmaker is part of an antitrust investigation into the semiconductor sector by the U.S. Department of Justice.
However, Nvidia stock is up 144% so far this year and 188% year over year.
“In 2024, the technology sector moved steadily into the ai phase of computing,” Bain & Co. said in technology-report/”>a recent study. “Cloud service providers, enterprises and technology vendors are spending more than ever on ai and adoption rates are high.”
The study says that creating value with ai requires changes to the work processes of hundreds or thousands of employees.
“Companies need to conduct business diagnostics, redesign processes, set goals and manage change as they implement this technology,” Bain said. “But early proof points of our clients' work are encouraging, showing that generative ai initiatives could be worth up to 20% of Ebitda.”
Last month, Nvidia posted better-than-expected second-quarter earnings while unveiling plans for a $50 billion share buyback. The group said demand for its legacy ai chips remains strong ahead of shipments of its new line of Blackwell processors.
Nvidia CEO: “We want to be the best in the world”
“We want to be consistently the best in the world,” Huang told analysts during the conference. company earnings call. “And that's why we try so hard.”
“Of course, we also want our dreams to come true and all the capabilities that we imagine in the future and the benefits that we can bring to society, we want all of that to come true,” he added.
Huang, who has said that “we are at the beginning of a new industrial revolution,” has been making some changes to his portfolio, according to Barron.
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The former Denny's employee raised $713 million through stock sales executed under his Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, an average price of $118.83 per share.
The plan was due to take effect until March 2025, but it sold all of the allocated shares six months before its expiration. Huang could adopt another plan to sell more shares.
Huang's scheme sold shares from a personal account that now holds 75.4 million Nvidia shares, according to a form he filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also owns 786 million shares of the company through trusts and companies.
Huang is the largest individual owner of Nvidia stock, according to the company's latest proxy filing, and owned a 3.8% stake at the end of March, before his stock sales in 2024.
In 2023, he sold 237,500 Nvidia shares, all in September, for $110 million, an average price of $463.95 each.
That share count and price predated a 10-for-1 stock split that took effect in early June. The 2023 sales were also planned transactions, involving the acquisition of shares through the use of options.
Related: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just told investors what's next for the ai chip maker
