Huang's net worth soared to $91 billion and is expected to surpass Musk to become the world's richest man next year

Tencent Technology

2024-05-27 19:38Posted on the official account of Beijing Tencent News Technology Channel

Highlights:

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  Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang's personal net worth has ballooned dramatically over the past five years, from $3 billion to about $91 billion.

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  At the current rate of growth, Huang is on track to replace Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the world's richest man by 2025.

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  Nvidia has a market capitalization of $2.6 trillion, which is equivalent to the combined market capitalization of two Metas, three Berkshire Hathaways, or five ExxonMobils.

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  Nvidia is like a "shovel seller" during the gold rush period, and currently has few competitors in the GPU market.

Tencent Technology News According to foreign media reports, Huang Jenxun, founder and CEO of Nvidia, has had a rich fortune since the company was established more than 30 years ago. But in the past few months, his personal wealth has grown dramatically, reaching staggering levels that rival the wealth of other countries.

Huang, 61, founded Nvidia in Silicon Valley in 1993 to develop GPUs for 3D games. While the gaming business has been a major source of revenue for Nvidia for years, the company has also expanded into other markets such as cloud gaming subscriptions, the metaverse, and cryptocurrency mining chips.

Nvidia's fortunes took a dramatic turn at the end of 2022, when AI startup OpenAI released its chatbot ChatGPT, showing the public the potential of generative AI. This technology heralds a new era in which computers will be able to not only retrieve information from databases, but also generate new content and answer questions from large amounts of unsorted data. Much of OpenAI's AI development efforts rely on Nvidia's GPUs.

As companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta ramp up their investments in AI research and development, they need billions of dollars of the latest AI chips to build their models, and GPUs become the key to realizing extremely computing power-hungry AI technologies.

Huang owns about 86.76 million shares of Nvidia, or more than 3.5 percent of the company's outstanding shares. Five years ago, Huang's stake in Nvidia was worth about $3 billion. With Nvidia shares hitting an all-time high last week, the market value of Huang's stake has soared to more than $91 billion.

Currently, Nvidia's market capitalization has reached a staggering $2.6 trillion. That's more than two Metas, three Berkshire Hathaways, or five ExxonMobils combined.

Goldman Sachs hailed Nvidia as "the most important stock on the planet" because of the company's central position in the booming artificial intelligence industry, which is expected to surpass Apple in market value in the coming months.

Following a three-fold increase in Nvidia's share price in 2023, the company's share price has doubled again this year. Over the past five years, Nvidia shares have increased 28 times. Prior to the AI boom, Huang had increased his stake in Nvidia at a relatively low in 2022.

According to the latest data from Bloomberg, Huang became the 17th richest person in the world at $91 billion as of Friday's close, more than double his worth last Christmas.

At this rate of growth, Huang, who is known for his low-key rather than Silicon Valley's ostentatious image of the tech world, is on track to surpass Elon Musk as the world's richest man by 2025. At that time, Nvidia will be the most valuable company in the world.

Of course, the stock market is always uncertain, and as the volatility of the stock price a few weeks ago showed, many people believe that Nvidia's share price may be overvalued.

While there are still uneven developments in AI technology, such as OpenAI's advanced public version outperforming humans in stock picking, Google's new AI chatbot, Gemini, mistakenly suggesting people to eat stones. However, for Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, these technical shortcomings do not seem to affect the growth of his personal wealth. Regardless of whether the answer given by the AI program is correct or not, AI systems require enormous computing power, and Nvidia has almost dominated the market in producing computer chips that can meet this demand. Even the most basic AI applications require extensive use of GPUs made by NVIDIA.

The Silicon Valley elite believe that AI will eventually reach the realm of superhuman intelligence, which has prompted almost all tech companies to put AI technology at the heart of their business. Against this backdrop, Huang's Nvidia seems to be a "shovel seller" during the gold rush. Many companies vying for the position of the next giant in artificial intelligence may lose, and Nvidia has already made a lot of money.

Huang shares many similarities with CEOs of other tech companies. He has always presented an iconic image at TED and Wall Street presentations, and has spent his free time in mansions in California and Hawaii. Huang has also made some surprising remarks that tech leaders occasionally make. For example, he once said, "The entertainment value of pain and suffering cannot be ignored." ”

However, Nvidia is a truly hardcore technology company, unlike those that are dominated by advertising — Huang's expertise lies in hardware, not software. He was educated at a Baptist reform school in Kentucky (his uncle is said to have mistaken it for a prestigious school and sent him there; His roommate was illiterate and flaunted his knife wounds), and later went on to pursue his studies at Oregon State University and Stanford University, earning a master's degree in electrical engineering.

Huang is not an outsider to Silicon Valley, especially now that Nvidia has become the chip supplier that many companies rely on. He has publicly praised Musk's plan to transform Tesla into self-driving technology — after all, it's also an artificial intelligence. However, hardware manufacturers like Nvidia have been decades away from becoming the world's most valuable company; Intel's dominance in computing has long since been overtaken by companies that make more compelling consumer electronics. The reality is that Nvidia has few (perhaps none) competitors capable of making the processors needed for the upcoming AI industry. (Compilation/Mowgli)

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