The chief executive of the planet's most highly valued corporation did not gain his understanding of America via prestigious academic institutions or startup development hubs. His formative experiences began at a country boarding school in Kentucky, where pupils smoked, possessed knives, and the youngest attendee, a nine-year-old, was tasked with maintaining the lavatories.
TL;DR
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang started as a 9-year-old janitor at a Kentucky boarding school.
- His parents sent him and his brother to the U.S. with minimal resources in the 1970s.
- Huang developed Nvidia's core tenets from his humble origins and belief in opportunity.
- He pioneered concepts like CUDA and the DGX1, initially met with skepticism.
That student was Jensen Huang.
During a recent podcast appearance featuring Joe Rogan, the Nvidia chief executive officer recounted that unlikely origin story, attributing it to his parents. They had dispatched him and his sibling to the United States around the mid-1970s with virtually no resources. The family had been residing in Bangkok amidst one of Thailand's recurring military takeovers, prompting his parents to deem it unsafe for the children to remain. They reached out to a relative they'd never met in Tacoma, Washington, requesting assistance in locating an American educational institution willing to enroll two international youngsters possessing minimal funds.
He discovered a place: Oneida Baptist Institute in Clay County, Kentucky, which was one of the poorest counties in the nation then and continues to be. The dormitory rooms lacked closet doors and locks, housing a multitude of children who smoked incessantly. Huang recounted his own attempt at smoking for a week, starting at age 9, and mentioned that conflicts were resolved with knives. Huang's roommate was a 17-year-old who had been wrapped in tape following a recent altercation; the “toughest kid in school,”, he stated. Every student was assigned a task. His sibling was dispatched to the tobacco fields operated by the institution to generate revenue for the school—“kind of like a penitentiary”—whereas Huang took on the role of janitor, responsible for maintaining the restrooms for a hundred adolescent males (“I just wished they would be a bit more careful” in the bathroom, he quipped.)
That unyielding optimism, even when recounting situations that seem harsh to nearly everyone else, permeated the whole discussion.
Huang stated that the majority of his recollections from that era were positive, and he recalls the occasion when he expressed his astonishment to his parents after dining out: “Mom and dad, we went to the most amazing restaurant today. This whole place is lit up. It’s like the future. And the food comes in a box and the food is incredible. The hamburger is incredible.”
“It was McDonald’s,” Huang laughed.
These recollections were eventually shared with his parents; the young men were managing these challenges independently. Since international phone conversations incurred significant costs, their parents procured an inexpensive tape recorder for them. On a monthly basis, they would document their experiences in the coal mining region via an audio message and dispatch it to Bangkok. Their parents would then reuse the same cassette, recording their own updates and sending it back.
Two years after their arrival, Huang's parents reached America, possessing only their luggage and a modest sum of cash. His mother took on employment as a domestic helper. His father, a qualified engineer by profession, sought employment by identifying advertisements in the newspaper's classified section and contacting the listed numbers. He ultimately secured a position with an engineering consultancy, where he was involved in the design of industrial plants and processing facilities.
“They left everything behind,” Huang said. “They started over in their late thirties.”
He still holds onto one recollection from those initial years that he described as “breaks my heart.” Shortly after his parents made their way to the U.S., the family resided in a leased, furnished dwelling when he and his sibling inadvertently damaged a fragile particle-board coffee table.
“I just still remember the look on my mom’s face,” he said. “They didn’t have any money, and she didn’t know how she was going to pay it back.”
For Huang, instances such as that illustrate the risks his parents undertook when they relocated to the U.S. “With almost no money”.
“My parents are incredible,” he said. “It’s hard not to love this country. It’s hard not to be romantic about this country.”
Nvidia's core tenets were shaped by Jensen Huang's modest origins.
This perspective of America—as a land where individuals extend opportunities to those prepared to seize them—is how Huang accounts for Nvidia's initial, improbable gambles.
Huang came up with the idea for Nvidia while sitting in a booth at a Denny’s, where he had worked first as a dishwasher and then a busboy. He wanted to build a chip that could power 3D graphics on a personal computer, and it was at that Denny’s booth that he met two friends to sketch out what would become the company.
Well before the firm was identified with the surge in artificial intelligence, Huang consistently guided it toward concepts that were poorly grasped by most and doubted by even more. CUDA represented one such concept. Upon its introduction by Nvidia in 2006, the expense of the processor approximately doubled, income remained stagnant, and the firm's market worth declined from approximately $12 billion to a range of $2 to $3 billion.
“When I launched CUDA, the audience was complete silence,” he said. “Nobody wanted it. Nobody asked for it. Nobody understood it.”
CUDA functions as the software framework that transforms graphics processing units into versatile computational engines, enabling them to handle extensive neural networks. Presently, it's true that almost all significant AI models currently in operation utilize hardware reliant on CUDA.
The same thing happened when he introduced Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer, the DGX1. The launch drew “complete silence,” he said, and there were no purchase orders. The only person who reached out was none other than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who told him he had “a nonprofit AI lab” that needed a system like this.
Huang assumed that meant the deal was impossible.
“All the blood drained out of my face,” he told Rogan. “A nonprofit is not buying a $300,000 computer.”
However, Musk, the wealthiest individual globally, persisted. Consequently, Huang packed one of the initial units, placed it in his vehicle, and transported it to San Francisco personally.
In 2016, he entered a modest upper-level chamber occupied by scientists—including Berkeley's leading robotics innovator, Pieter Abbeel, and OpenAI's co-founder, Ilya Sutskever—who were engaged in their work within a confined workspace. This particular room was, in fact, OpenAI, well before it achieved widespread recognition as a prominent AI entity globally. Huang entrusted the DGX1 to their care and then departed for his residence.
Reflecting, even though he's the CEO of a $4.5 trillion company and now attracts large audiences and people seeking his signature wherever he travels, he doesn't characterize any of this as prescience or bravery. For him, it's merely the ongoing legacy of the gambles his parents undertook when they dispatched two sons across the globe with very little.
“We really believed it, and so if you believe in that future, and you don’t do anything about it you’re going to regret it for your life,” Huang said.