Jen-Hsun Huang

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World Leader: Jen-Hsun Huang. Forbes, Sept 13, 2016 (In the section "Leader Board" and the heading "NEW BILLIONAIRE")

Note: Forbes has apparently stopped the practice of making all of its contents online for free. Huang was boan in Taiwan
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World Maker

Jen-Hsun Huang became a billionaire by helping to build artificial universes. Now he wants to build artificial intelligence.

WITHOUT JEN-HSUN HUANG, zombies would be less frightening, blood spatters less realistic and alien worlds less detailed. His Nvidia doesn't make videogames; it makes the high-end computer chips—the graphics processing units, or GPUs—that help a computer render ultra-detailed images at lightning speeds. "Huang has been an eff ective visionary and evangelist for these chips," says Craig A Ellis, an analyst at B Riley & Co, an investment bank.

Nvidia's dominance of the high-end graphics-card market for PCs (it has a 70%-plus share) has pushed its sales up 40% in the past five years, to $5 billion. One of its latest innovations, the $700 GTX 1080, is twice as fast as its predecessor and more power-efficient than anything its rivals make. Nvidia's stock has reached record highs, and those buoyant shares have increased the value of Huang's 4% stake in the Santa Clara, Calif. company to around $1.4 billion. Huang's family fled tumultuous Thailand for America in the 1970s. Huang worked his way through a Kentucky boarding school (scrubbing the bathrooms was among his chores there), then picked up a Stanford engineering degree before starting Nvidia in 1993. Back then, the company designed graphics processors for PCs and workstations but found it difficult to compete in what was a crowded field in the '90s—leading Huang, now 53, to pivot toward gaming. With PCs increasingly being replaced by mobile devices, Huang is eagerly looking around for Nvidia's next move—and believes he has found it in making chips that power the artificial intelligence in autonomous cars. "One of Nvidia's hallmarks is the way it finds new growth opportunities,' Ellis says.