By 2013, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang had made artificial intelligence a focus for a company built around PC graphics chips. That expansion followed the introduction of CUDA in 2006, which allowed researchers and developers to use NVIDIA’s graphics processors for computing tasks beyond games.
The software platform was an important part of that transition. On February 16, 2007, NVIDIA released a public beta of its CUDA software development kit and C compiler. The company said the tools made GPU computing accessible through the standard C programming language for applications including bioscience, seismic processing and financial modeling.
Huang later cited AlexNet’s success in the 2012 ImageNet image-recognition competition as an influence on NVIDIA’s AI strategy. The University of Toronto neural network was trained using NVIDIA GPUs. Huang said its effectiveness prompted the company to examine whether neural networks could be applied to a broader range of problems.
The commitment to AI initially raised concerns within NVIDIA. Bryan Catanzaro, its lead deep-learning researcher at the time, recalled his reservations: “I didn’t want him to fall into the same trap that the A.I. industry has had in the past,” he said.
Graphics chips and early setbacks
Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 with chip designers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The three discussed their plans at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, with an initial focus on chips for three-dimensional PC graphics.
The company’s first product, the NV1 multimedia card, arrived in 1995 and sold poorly. Huang later described NVIDIA’s early graphics architecture as incompatible with Microsoft’s DirectX, forcing the company to change its approach while running short of money.
The subsequent RIVA 128 represented that change. Huang said NVIDIA used emulation to test the chip and its software before committing to production because it could not afford the time required for repeated rounds of physical prototypes and corrections.
In 1999, NVIDIA went public and released the GeForce 256, which it marketed as the world’s first graphics processing unit, or GPU. The later development of CUDA extended the uses of its processors beyond graphics, providing software tools for scientific computing and, subsequently, deep learning.
Engineering background and university gifts
Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963. At nine, he and his older brother were sent to the United States to live with an uncle. Huang subsequently lived at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky. He was too young to attend the institute’s classes, so he attended a nearby public school. Huang later described being bullied during his childhood and credited his time at Oneida with helping him develop resilience.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master’s degree in the same field from Stanford University. Before founding NVIDIA, he worked at Advanced Micro Devices and LSI Logic.
His university philanthropy has included gifts made with his wife, Lori Huang. Oregon State University announced a $50 million gift from the couple to the OSU Foundation for the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex, supporting research and education in areas including AI, materials science and robotics.
Stanford also records a $30 million pledge from the couple for the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center, which opened in 2010.
