Nvidia Co-Founder Jensen Huang Gets $6.5 Billion Richer in a Single Day as Company Rides the AI Wave
Video game and GPU company Nvidia co-founder, Jensen Huang benefited from the company's shares and added $6.5 billion to his fortune recently. The tech billionaire owns approximately 3% of Nvidia’s shares and had registered a net worth of an estimated $27.5 billion when the market closed on Wednesday, May 24. On Thursday, May 25, Nvidia released its first-quarter earnings report, which showcased an estimated $11 billion in sales for the second quarter, which is 50% more earnings per share of $1.09, $0.17 higher than predicted. With the new earnings, Nvidia boasts of over $950 billion market capitalization and is poised to reach the $1 trillion mark as the sixth company to do so along with Apple, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, and Google parent company Alphabet and Amazon.
Huang explained during a press release that the company's expansion into the AI market brought about an increase in share value. “The computer industry is going through two simultaneous transitions — accelerated computing and generative AI," the statement read. According to Forbes, Nvidia’s chips are well poised for both and Huang said the company is "significantly increasing" supply to meet “surging demand.”
The Taiwan-based CEO's fortune currently stands at an estimated $34 billion. It surged up more than 23% in the 24 hours of May 25 to make him the world’s 37th richest person, as per Forbes’ real-time rankings. “Nvidia's results and guide leave us with our jaws dropped as the technological leadership in AI is being monetized and seems to be blasting through any lingering bear thesis concerns for now,” Cowen analyst led by Matthew Ramsay remarked.
Huang co-founded Nvidia along with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993 after deeply researching a market for improving gaming graphics. Chris Malachowsky, senior technology officer and one of the co-founders of Nvidia had exclusively told Forbes in 2016, "There was no market in 1993, but we saw a wave coming. There's a California surfing competition that happens in a five-month window every year. When they see some type of wave phenomenon or storm in Japan, they tell all the surfers to show up in California, because there's going to be a wave in two days. That's what it was. We were at the beginning."
Nvidia created the revolutionary GPUs - graphics processor units - that help computers create detailed and clean images and which, to this day, are used to power gaming consoles, autonomous vehicles, and robotics. This creation earned Nvidia high-end customers including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Amazon, and Meta.
Speaking about their entry into the AI market, CEO Huang explained, “We're seeing incredible orders to retool the world's data centers. And so I think you're seeing the beginning of, call it, a 10-year transition to basically recycle or reclaim the world's data centers and build it out as accelerated computing. You'll have a pretty dramatic shift in the spend of a data center from traditional computing and to accelerate computing with SmartNICs, smart switches, of course, GPUs and the workload is going to be predominantly generative AI."
