Jensen Huang, the founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia, the most valuable chip company in the US, is the ultimate engineer at the forefront of computing technology. This year, he was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people, and the tributary article was written by Andrew Ng — a name that would be familiar to many readers as the professor who taught Stanford’s famous “CS229: Machine Learning” course. Ng wrote: “the software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang.”

Huang has served as CEO of Nvidia since he founded the company in 1993. In 2003, Nvidia adapted graphics processing units (GPUs) that were used to paint graphics on computer screens to perform other general computing tasks. The improved computing power made possible the processing of bigger neural networks, advancing research in artificial intelligence. During the 25 years or so of the company’s history, complexity of computer graphics has increased by around 500 million times, far exceeding Moore’s Law, which predicts that chip performance will double every couple of years.  If it were not for Nvidia’s improvements in chip design, chip performance would have increased only 100,000 times during the same period. Nvidia’s market cap is over 760 billion USD, and it is ranked 184 among the Fortune 500 companies. Huang was selected by his peers to receive the semiconductor industry’s biggest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award.

According to Ng, Huang’s success is attributed to his genuine passion for technological advancement. He wrote: “Huang’s gamble paid off largely because he is among the world’s most technically savvy CEOs. He’s also a compassionate steward of his employees and a generous supporter of education in science and technology.” Huang studied electrical engineering for both undergraduate and master’s degrees, and before founding Nvidia, he was a director at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. In 2015, Huang gave his alma mater Stanford 30 million USD to build the Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center. Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation, co-founded with his wife who is also an engineer, made over 10 million USD grants last year alone for STEM education.

Huang’s company is preparing for yet another technological innovation: metaverse — or omniverse, as he prefers to call it. In last month’s GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia unveiled Earth 2, a super computer-hosted simulation to fight climate change. Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 classic novel Snow Crash, Nvidia envisions a shared virtual 3D world that is interactive, immersive, and collaborative. According to Huang, “the virtual world will soon be larger in economics than the physics world.” Partnered with BMW, Nvidia’s omniverse is building a digital twin factory, simulating every aspect of its manufacturing operations. As Ng noted, “Huang’s team is well-positioned to keep driving technological advances for decades to come.” Jensen Huang is well deserving of the title, the ultimate engineer, as he imagined the future once deemed impossible and made it a reality — and he continues to do so.