Nvidia's Jensen Huang was bullied in school for his poor English skills: 'Kids were really tough'

Jensen Huang's personal fortune now stands at $150 billion.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of chip giant Nvidia, now a global powerhouse in AI, faced a harrowing two-year ordeal in his childhood, enduring bullying and being forced to clean toilets because of his poor English skills. This challenging period, a stark contrast to his current status as one of the world's richest entrepreneurs, began when he was sent from Taiwan to a boarding school in Kentucky when he was nine.

Huang, originally named Jen-Hsun, was born in Taipei in 1963. At nine, he and his brother were sent to a boarding school in small-town Kentucky, an institution his uncle had mistakenly believed to be prestigious. In reality, it was a school for troubled youth. Too young to be a student, Huang boarded there but attended a nearby public school alongside children of tobacco farmers. It was here, hampered by his poor English, that he was bullied and assigned the task of cleaning toilets. This difficult period, however, proved transformative. He recounted to US broadcaster NPR, "We worked really hard, we studied really hard, and the kids were really tough," adding, "the ending of the story is I loved the time I was there."

This early adversity did not deter Huang. After his parents, who had settled in Oregon, brought him home, he graduated from university at just 20. He began his career designing chips at AMD, then LSI Logic, before founding Nvidia in 1993 with two friends in a Silicon Valley diner. His goal was to "solve problems that normal computers can't" by developing powerful semiconductors for 3D graphics, as he explained on the "No Priors" podcast.

Nvidia launched its first GPU in 1999, strategically positioned at the intersection of video games, data centers, cloud computing, and now, generative AI. The company's products, including GPUs selling for tens of thousands of dollars, are essential in developing generative AI like ChatGPT. Nvidia's meteoric rise, fueled by "big tech's insatiable appetite," has propelled the California chipmaker beyond a $4 trillion market valuation, a historic first. Huang's personal fortune now stands at $150 billion, largely due to his approximate 3.5 percent stake in the company he founded three decades ago.

(With inputs from AFP)