Jensen Huang Net Worth 2024: Leading the Graphics & AI Industries to Build a $63 Billion Fortune

Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese-American billionaire, has seen his net worth skyrocket in 2024.

Today, Jensen Huang’s net worth most likely exceeds $65 billion and keeps growing.

The business magnate is the co-founder and CEO of the technology company NVIDIA Corporation, which develops GPUs, SoCs, APIs, and other hardware and software.

Under Huang’s leadership, the company has become a dominant force in the graphics card industry and the most important AI hardware maker in the world.

Nvidia recently made Huang’s fortune quadruple thanks to its stock price skyrocketing in recent months as AI took over the world.

Jensen Huang’s Net Worth: Full Breakdown

Most of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth came from his salary, bonuses, dividends, and his stake in Nvidia.

Since Nvidia’s stock is quite volatile, a single day of trading could add (or lose) a billion dollars or more to the engineer’s net worth.

This makes it hard to track down or estimate Huang’s exact wealth, especially since his 3.6% stake is not entirely owned by him.

Here is what we know about his assets, stock, and salaries.

5 Quick Facts About Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA

1. Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993, which is now valued at over $1 trillion.
2. His NVIDIA stock holdings include 86.7 million shares, worth billions.
3. Huang has donated over $200 million to educational institutions.
4. He lives in a $38 million mansion in Pacific Heights, San Francisco.
5. NVIDIA’s success in AI and data centers has made it a key player in the tech industry.

Latest News on Jensen Huang (2024 Updates)

As of 2024, NVIDIA continues to dominate the AI and GPU markets.

In recent news, NVIDIA reported a massive surge in stock prices, driven by the global demand for AI technology, with applications spanning data centers, gaming, and autonomous vehicles. This increase has significantly contributed to Jensen Huang’s wealth, pushing his net worth beyond $65 billion.

NVIDIA’s AI chips are being widely adopted, including by Palantir Technologies, as part of their data analytics and AI strategy, marking a notable collaboration between two AI giants.

Jensen Huang’s Early Life: The Makings of a Graphics Genius

Jen-Hsun Huang, or, as we know him, Jensen Huang, was born on February 17, 1963, in Tainan City, Taiwan.

When he was five years old, his family moved to Thailand.

However, since there was a risk of escalated violence in the region due to the ongoing Vietnam War, his parents soon decided to send their two sons to the US to live with their uncle.

At the age of 10, Jen-Hsun Huang and his brother lived in a dormitory at Oneida Baptist Institute while they studied at the Oneida Elementary School in Kentucky.

Eventually, his parents emigrated to the US and settled in Oregon, where young Jensen enrolled at Aloha High School and later, Oregon State University.

Huang graduated from the university with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering degree in 1984 at the young age of sixteen. He then completed his Master’s program in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1992.

While at Oregon, Huang met Lori Mills, his engineering lab partner and future wife.

The couple has two children, a son, Spencer Huang, and a daughter, Madison Huang, both of whom now work at NVIDIA.

Jensen Huang Net Worth: Founding a $1.8 Trillion Company at 30

Huang didn’t co-found NVIDIA straight out of school. He landed a few jobs at different companies after graduating and founded the business on his 30th birthday. Let’s see how he became the billionaire CEO Jensen Huang we know of today.

Early Career

After college, Huang started his career at Advanced Micro Devices Inc., otherwise known as AMD. He worked at this company between 1984 and 1985 and was mostly tasked with designing microprocessors.

Interestingly, it was later revealed in 2020 that the AMD CEO Lisa Su is Huang’s first cousin once removed.

After his stint at AMD, he joined the semiconductor design and software engineering company LSI Logic.

He worked at the company until 1993 and quickly rose through the ranks in his division, first in the marketing department and then in general management, working as a director.

Shortly after leaving LSI Logic, Huang co-founded NVIDIA with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky and became the company’s CEO and president.

The Beginnings of NVIDIA

NVIDIA was founded on 17 February 1993 when Jensen celebrated his 30th birthday. The partners incorporated it in Delaware, and while Huang was the CEO, Priem worked as the Chief Technical Officer.

Priem retired from the company in 2003, while Malachowsky remains a member of the company’s executive staff.

Before this venture, Chris Malachowsky worked at Sun Microsystems while Curtis Priem was the senior staff engineer and graphic chip designer at the same company, as well as spent some time working at IBM.

Huang co-founded NVIDIA in a meeting at Denny’s roadside diner in East San Jose. In September 2023, Denny’s CEO, Kelli Valade, unveiled a plaque at the diner to commemorate the founding of NVIDIA.

“This is a place where we fuel ideas. Your story is so inspiring it will continue to inspire people at Denny’s,” Valade said to Huang when she presented him with the plaque.

Interestingly, Huang shared at the event that his first job was at Denny’s in Portland when he was only 15 years old.

The California-based company started with a small but magnificent idea of creating a processing unit to use in 3D applications. Fast forward to 1999, and the three partners created the graphics processing unit (GPU), which accelerated the functions of graphics when added to computers.

The business wasn’t always called NVIDIA. Initially, the three partners didn’t give it a name and called all their files NV as in “next version”. Their first idea was to name it “Invidia”, which is the Latin word for “envy'” At this point, the headquarters of the company was in Sunnyvale, California.

The focus of the partners was on powering video games with a new kind of specialized graphics hardware.

This became their tool to reach large markets. They founded the company with $40,000 in the bank and soon enough, it received $20 million of venture capital funding from several major brands, including Sequoia Capital.

Releases, Acquisitions, and Success of NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s first graphics processor unit (GPU), the NV1, was optimized to process quadratic primitives, unlike the competitors’ products which processed triangle primitives.

When Microsoft introduced its DirectX platform, which didn’t support any other graphic software and only supported triangles, NVIDIA came across an impossible barrier and was very close to going bankrupt.

So, in 1996, Huang decided to lay off over half of the company’s employees and focus the remaining resources on developing a GPU optimized for processing triangle primitives. That’s when Nvidia came up with the RIVA 128.

This was a desperate time for the business. At one point, NVIDIA stated the following: “Our company is thirty days from going out of business”.

Reportedly, they had enough money for a single month of payroll when RIVA 128 was officially released in August 1997.

However, since the product sold a million pieces in only four months, the company got back on its feet – and Huang gathered enough capital to develop new products.

The RIVA TNT, which was released a year later, solidified the brand’s reputation in the market. In 1999, NVIDIA went public.

On the day when it went public, NVIDIA raised $42 million by offering 3.5 million shares at $12 apiece. Even with this price, the stock opened at $21 and closed out after a single day of trading.

That same year, NVIDIA released their popular GeForce 256, known for its on-board transformation and lighting it brought to consumer-level 3D hardware.

The product offered advanced video acceleration and motion compensation and greatly outperformed competing products on the market.

The launch of the GeForce 256 was monumental in both the PC and gaming industries. Finally, game developers could make 3D games that consumers could actually run.

Due to the success of its limited number of products, NVIDIA was chosen to develop the graphics hardware for the Xbox game console. Microsoft paid the company a $200 million advance for this project.

Eventually, Huang led the company to develop another trending product in the summer of 2000, the GeForce2 GTS. That same year, NVIDIA agreed to buy the intellectual assets of 3dfx, its rival, an acquisition that was finalized two years later.

In 2002, NVIDIA made a second major purchase when they bought Excluna, though the details have not been publicly disclosed.

Excluna is a brand behind software-rendering tools and, when Huang acquired it through Nvidia, he also merged the personnel of the company into the Cg project.

NVIDIA’s biggest branch today is the AI and data center business. The rise of the business has been remarkable thanks to the many platforms that NVIDIA has been developing since their first Tesla GPU compute engines.

Here are some other notable acquisitions that helped make NVIDIA the success it is today:

• Media Q for $70 million in 2003
• iReady in 2004
• ULI Electronics in 2005
• Hybrid Graphics in 2006
• PortalPlayer in 2007
• Ageia in 2008
• Icera in 2011
• PGI from STMicroelectronics in 2013
• Arm from SoftBank Group for $40 billion, with the company retaining a 10% share of NVIDIA

During the last decade, the company has developed and released several highly-ranked products on the market, mostly included in these product families:

• GeForce, graphic processing products
• NVIDIA RTX, professional visual graphics processing products
• Tegra, systems on a chip series used on mobile devices
• NVS, a multi-display graphics solution for businesses
• Tesla, GPU for high-end image generation applications
• NVIDIA GRID, a set of services for graphic virtualization
• nForce, motherboard chipset created for Intel and AMD microprocessors
• NVIDIA Shield, gaming hardware including Shield Android TV, Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and more
• NVIDIA Drive, automotive solutions for manufacturers of autonomous vehicles, including Drive PX and Driveworks
• NVIDIA Bluefield, data processing units
• NVIDIA Datacenter or NVIDIA Grace, a CPU

Partnerships and Collaborations with Other Brands

In 2004, NVIDIA worked with Sony to design the graphic processor for the PlayStation 3 game console. In 2007, NVIDIA was named the Company of the Year by Forbes.

In January 2011, NVIDIA signed a cross-licensing agreement worth $1.5 billion for six years of work with Intel.

It is no secret that Huang is a great proponent of the use of artificial intelligence, which has brought him billions in the last few years alone.

In May 2017, the company announced a partnership with Toyota, which will use its Drive PX-series artificial intelligence platform for its self-driving cars.

That same year, NVIDIA and the Chinese search company Baidu announced an AI partnership for autonomous driving, cloud computing, and consumer devices. NVIDIA’s Drive PX 2 AI is the foundation of Baidu’s self-driving platform.

A year later, Google decided to use NVIDIA’s Tesla P4 graphic cards for the artificial intelligence on their Google Cloud service.

Fast forward to 2023, and Getty Images partnered with the company to launch Generative AI by Getty Images, which is a new tool that allows people to create images using licensed photos and photos from the Getty Library. Getty uses NVIDIA’s Edify model.

Finances and Stake in NVIDIA

After the public listing on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in 1999, the demand for NVIDIA shares saw a downturn after a few years, mostly because of the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

During the 2010s, NVIDIA’s shares experienced a steady climb but they only picked up significantly in the last few years, starting from 2021.

During the first 11 months of 2023, the stock experienced an incredible rise of 227%, contributing billions to Huang’s net worth.

At the start of February 2024, NVIDIA’s market cap surpassed Amazon’s for a short time, and up to February 12, 2024, the stock had seen a 46% price increase year to date, ballooning Huang’s net worth.

During the 2020 fiscal year, NVIDIA reported earnings of $2.796 billion and an annual revenue of over $10 billion, which was a decline compared to the previous year. The shares at the time traded at around $531.

For the second quarter of 2020, NVIDIA had a 50% rise in sales from the same period in 2019. However, in May 2023, NVIDIA crossed $1 trillion in market valuation, a number that grew to $1.2 trillion by November of the same year.

Today, Bloomberg ranks NVIDIA as one of the Magnificent Seven, which are the seven biggest companies on the stock market.

Jensen Huang owns 3.5% of NVIDIA stock or 8 million shares, but he doesn’t own all this stock privately.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2023, 78.7 million shares are held in partnership with family members of Huang and trusts, which also adds to his net worth, though we don’t know how much exactly.

This number of shares is worth over $60 billion today, though we don’t know how much exactly Huang has from this total.

He reportedly earned $24.6 million as the company’s CEO in 2007, but we have no information about his salary in the following years until 2022. In 2022, he reportedly made $23,737,661 as the director, president, and CEO of the company. In 2023, he raked in $21.3 million.

Huang makes his money not only from his base salary but also from bonuses and incentives, in cash and RSUs, as well as dividends.

For instance, in 2022, NVIDIA’s dividend payment was 16 cents a share, which means that Huang got nearly $14 million in dividends in one year alone, assuming that he has 86.7 million shares.

As the stock price of NVIDIA has grown, especially in the last year, Huang surpassed Nike’s founder, Phil Knight, and the hedge fund legend Ken Griffin in net worth. The main reason for the stock climbing at such a fast pace is the dominance of NVIDIA in the market for graphic processing units that power AI products, such as ChatGPT.

NVIDIA’s growth and gains made the company’s stock the best-performing S&P 500 stock of 2023 and outperformed the mega-caps Tesla and Meta Platforms, even though they also had a strong 2023.

While Huang is far from the wealth of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, he has shot up much higher on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index list, reaching 27th place at one point.

Impact of AI on NVIDIA’s Growth

NVIDIA’s meteoric rise in 2024 can be attributed largely to its AI-focused hardware. T

he company’s GPUs, particularly the A100 and H100 series, have become essential in training large language models and powering generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Bard. This has resulted in NVIDIA becoming a critical player in the future of AI, further solidifying its position in sectors like cloud computing, gaming, and data centers.

Huang’s leadership in leveraging AI technology for both commercial and enterprise applications has expanded NVIDIA’s global reach and market valuation beyond $1 trillion.

Philanthropic Endeavors

Jensen Huang is a major philanthropist who has donated a fortune to charitable causes over the years. For instance, in 2022, he donated $50 million to his alma mater, Oregon State University.

This was just a small portion of the total he has donated to his school, which reportedly goes up to $200 million, which he donated to create a supercomputing institute on campus.

That’s not the only school he donated to, either. He also gifted Stanford University with a $30 million donation to build the Jen Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center.

He also gave Oneida Baptist Institute, his other school, $2 million to build a new dormitory for girls and a classroom building called Huang Hall.

Together with his wife, he founded the Jen Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation, which has made over $17 million in contributions and gifts.

Awards and Accolades

As one of the biggest names in the software and hardware industries, Huang has earned plenty of prestigious awards and honors, including:

• Named Entrepreneur of the Year in High Technology by Ernst & Young in 1999
• Awarded the Daniel J. Epstein Engineering Management Award from the University of Southern California in 2002
• Awarded the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award from the Fabless Semiconductor Association in 2004
• Named Alumni Fellow by Oregon State University in 2005
• Awarded the Silicon Valley Education Foundation’s Pioneer Business Leader Award in 2007
• Received an honorary doctorate from Oregon State University in 2009; and an honorary doctorate from National Taiwan University in 2020
• Named Best Performing CEO in the World by the Harvard Business Review in 2019
• Named Supplier CEO of the Year by Automotive News Europe Eurostars in 2020
• Awarded the Robert N. Noyce Award by the Semiconductor Industry Association in 2021
• Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024

Jensen Huang Net Worth: Investment Portfolio

There’s not much information about what Huang invests in other than his investments through NVIDIA.

Reportedly, he has millions in real estate assets, including his mansion worth $38 million in Billionaire’s Row in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and two children.

While he creates part of the technology for autonomous vehicles, there’s little information about what he owns or drives this vehicle type.

At one point, he promoted the Mercedes Benz S-Class vehicle, but we do not know if he owns one.

What Can We Learn from Jensen Huang’s Story?

Jensen Huang has led a remarkable life chock-full of valuable lessons that we should all learn.

For starters, his incredibly successful leadership at NVIDIA has been marked by a strong focus on vision and innovation. This has allowed the brand to become a leader in artificial intelligence technology and graphic processing units.

He has been committed to pushing the boundaries of technology, which showcases how important visionary leadership is in driving company success.

NVIDIA’s success is built on technological leadership in varied areas, highlighting the importance of diversification in business.

Huang has helped the business grow in the realms of gaming, autonomous vehicles, AI hardware, data centers, and more, showing how important it is to stay ahead of the curve in rapidly evolving industries.

Over the years, Huang has fostered a strong ecosystem around NVIDIA’s technologies and products, which includes partnerships with software developers, industry leaders, and numerous profitable acquisitions.

Finally, Huang’s leadership is characterized by thinking in the long term. He has prioritized investments in development and research and many of his initiatives take years to materialize.