Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang is one of the richest people in the world and thanks to AI (artificial intelligence), the 60-year-old doubled his fortune this year and is now worth about $35 billion.
Last week, Huang's net worth soared by almost $7 billion as per Bloomberg's billionaires index while Nvidia surged to become the world's most valuable listed semiconductor company as a major supplier of chips and computing systems for AI.
Huang, who was born in southern Taiwan before his family emigrated to the US when he was a child, said AI was leading a computing revolution, hailing the end of the "digital divide".
Speaking to thousands of people at the Computex forum in Taipei last week, Huang said, "There's no question we're in a new computing era. Every single computing era you could do different things that weren't possible before, and artificial intelligence certainly qualifies."
"The programming barrier is incredibly low. We have closed the digital divide. Everyone is a programmer now - you just have to say something to the computer," Reuters quoted him as saying. "The rate of progress, because it's so easy to use, is the reason why it's growing so fast. This is going to touch literally every single industry."
Nvidia's chips have helped companies such as Microsoft add human-like chat features to search engines including Bing. Jensen Huang demonstrated what AI could do, including getting a programme to write a short pop song praising Nvidia with only a few words of instruction.
The business magnate also created a flutter on social media recently when he was spotted at a street market in Taipei, shopping without much of a security detail.
Born as Jen-hsun Huang in Taipei in 1963, Huang spent a part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand, Bloomberg reported.
In 1973, Huang's parents sent the kids to relatives in the US owing to the social unrest in the Southeast Asian country, before relocating there themselves.
The billionaire -- who is years older than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos when they left day-to-day operations at 52 and 57 years old, respectively, as per Business Insider -- got a tattoo of Nvidia's logo on one arm when the company's share price hit $100.
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