Jen-Hsun Huang
Biography
Jensen Huang’s leadership in developing graphics processing unit (GPU) computing has helped create entire industries, advance science and medicine, and transform the way people work and live. Huang founded NVIDIA in 1994 and continues to serve as its president and CEO.
Under his leadership, it developed the GPU in 1999 as a programmable logic chip for specialized display functions, such as real-time programmable shading. NVIDIA was the first to demonstrate ray-traced graphics running on GPUs, and today NVIDIA's tools are the standard for professional graphics used by major motion picture studios, automotive designers, and architects. Beyond graphics, Huang threw NVIDIA’s full support behind the emerging field of GPU computing by developing the CUDA language, providing hardware support for scientific computing and developing numerical libraries. Through his vision and persistence, GPUs now power the fastest supercomputer in the United States (Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory), in Europe (HPC5, at Italian energy giant Eni), and in Japan (ABCI, at AIST). Supercomputers use GPUs in tandem with CPUs to speed up calculations, where dramatically faster execution times are achieved by offloading parallelizable computationally intensive portions of an application onto the GPU while the remainder of the code continues to run on the CPU. Huang realized early on that GPUs are well suited for the kind of number-crunching math involved in deep neural networks and machine learning. GPUs were shown to accelerate training algorithms by orders of magnitude, bringing running times of weeks down to hours. As a result of his vision and commitment, NVDIA’s GPU computing technologies are powering deep machine learning applications that are igniting the modern era of artificial intelligence, with the GPUs acting as the brains of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.
Named Fortune magazine’s 2017 Businessperson of the Year, recipient of the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award (2004), and named the world’s leading CEO by Harvard Business Review in 2019, Huang is currently chief executive office of NVIDIA, Santa Clara, CA, USA.
