Top 18

Jensen Huang

CEO & President, NVIDIA

$79.3B

Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia, a leading graphics-chip maker, in 1993 and has remained its CEO and president ever since. He owns approximately 3% of Nvidia, which went public in 1999.

Born in Taiwan, Huang relocated to Thailand during his childhood due to civil unrest, before eventually settling in the U.S. Under his leadership, Nvidia rose to prominence in computer gaming chips and expanded its portfolio to include chips for data centers and autonomous vehicles.

Huang has made substantial philanthropic contributions, including a $30 million donation to Stanford University for an engineering center and a $50 million contribution to Oregon State University for a research center named after him.

Nvidia has emerged as a leading producer of GPU technology, playing a crucial role in AI hardware and software. The company gained significant recognition in 2022 when OpenAI's ChatGPT generative AI chatbot, developed using Nvidia GPUs, became accessible to the public.

However, Nvidia's growing influence and the broader implications of AI have attracted regulatory scrutiny. In September 2023, Nvidia's French offices were subject to a cloud computing antitrust inquiry, sparking investigations by regulatory bodies worldwide, including those in the European Union and China. These inquiries underscore the need for careful examination of Nvidia's practices and its role in the AI industry.