MetaTrader, Amazon, or Google… In recent years, Nvidia has surpassed the market capitalization of these three giants and is approaching that of Apple. If there’s one big winner from this dynamism, it’s undoubtedly Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of the company. In a single day last Thursday, $7 billion was added to his personal fortune. A sum that has continued to grow since then.
Like Elon Musk or Bernard Arnault in France, the wealth of this 60-year-old is directly linked to the valuation of his company. Last week’s surge was due to the release of extremely strong quarterly results . Jensen Huang owns 86.76 million shares of Nvidia, representing approximately 3.5% of the outstanding stock. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the value of his shares has increased 28-fold in five years, rising from $3 billion to $90 billion, according to CNBC .
Nvidia was born in Silicon Valley in 1993 from the minds of young engineers Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem, and Jensen Huang. The start-up committed itself to the development of graphics processing units (GPUs), then not very popular, for 3D video games.
After some initial difficulties, Nvidia established itself as a leading brand for video gamers. Its dominance in AI chips, representing 80% of the global market, was built during the 2000s and 2010s . Nvidia developed its technology in 2007 to enable its GPUs to perform multiple calculations in parallel—a feature now essential for training and operating AI.
Under Jensen Huang’s leadership, the company fully committed to the then-emerging technology of deep learning in the early 2010s. This gamble paid off with the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. The AI race boosted Nvidia’s sales. The group’s value tripled in 2023, having already doubled in 2022. This success propelled Jensen Huang’s fortune, placing him among the 20 richest people in the world.
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