Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California on March 19, 2024.
David Paul Morris | David Paul Morris Bloomberg | Getty Images
five years ago, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang owns a stake worth about $3 billion in its chip maker. Thursday’s gains pushed the stock to a record high, and his holdings now exceed $90 billion.
Nvidia reported first-quarter earnings late Wednesday that beat expectations, with sales rising more than 200% for the third consecutive quarter, driven by demand for artificial intelligence processors.
Huang also issued a better-than-expected forecast and told investors that the company believes that demand for its artificial intelligence graphics processing units (GPUs) cannot be met. The company says its customers, especially large cloud companies, can get strong returns on their investments in expensive chips.
“We are fundamentally changing the way computing works and what computers can do,” Huang said.
Huang Renxun owns approximately 86.76 million shares of Nvidia, accounting for more than 3.5% of the company’s issued shares. As the stock rose more than 9% on Thursday to close at nearly $1,038 a share, the value of his stake increased by about $7.7 billion.
Nvidia shares have more than doubled this year after tripling in 2023. Huang increased his stake in 2022, when the stock hit relative lows ahead of the artificial intelligence boom.
Huang, 61, founded the Silicon Valley company in 1993 and is committed to building GPUs for 3D games. While gaming has been the company’s biggest business for decades, Nvidia has branched out into other markets, including Cloud game subscriptionMetaverse and cryptocurrency mining chips.
But Nvidia’s fortunes changed dramatically at the end of 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, opening the concept of generative AI to the wider public. The technology envisions a future in which computers can not only retrieve new information from databases but also generate new content and answers to questions from caches of vast unsorted data.
Most of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence development is performed on Nvidia GPUs. As with other companies, e.g. Microsoft, Google and Yuan To bolster investment in AI R&D, they need billions of dollars worth of the latest AI chips to build their models.
Huang has been a spokesman for Nvidia and its key sales force, touting the potential and power of using the company’s GPUs to build artificial intelligence.
Nvidia has been developing artificial intelligence software and tools for more than a decade, eventually becoming a top supplier to the largest technology companies. The company currently has about 80% of the market share of artificial intelligence chips, and Huang is one of the 20 richest people in the world.