Jensen Huang, born in Taiwan in 1963, had two troubled years when he arrived in the United States and, at the age of nine, was sent (by mistake) to a teaching institution where he had to clean toilets while his brother worked on a tobacco plantation.
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07/07/2026
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O co-founder and current CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has become in recent years one of the most unavoidable personalities in the world of technology. Once one of the most well-known companies in the world of video games due to the brand's graphics cards, Nvidia has recently become one of the leading players in the production of chips dedicated to artificial intelligence training.
This bet under Huang's leadership made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world, counting on the date of publication of this piece with a capitalization of $4.63 billion (EUR 4 billion). In the process, Huang also became one of the richest people in the world, currently occupying the 9th place of the bloomberg index with a wealth of us$ 162 billion – the equivalent of eur 141,6 billion.
What you may not know is that Huang didn't always have an easy life and that in the early days after moving to the U.S., he washed toilets when he was only 9.
These details of the life of the leader of Nvidia are available in Huang's biography in britannica website, where these and many other details about their journey are revealed.
Huang was born on February 17, 1963 in Tainan, Taiwan, and after the family moved briefly to Thailand, parents – a chemical engineer and a primary teacher – considered that, due to the war in the country, the best thing to do was to move to the US.
Huang, at the age of nine, was (together with his older brother) living with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington. This uncle eventually decided to send the two boys to a school in Oneida, Kentucky, believing it was a prestigious religious school.
It turns out that this school was actually a reformatory for young people considered “hard”, with Huang seeing himself doing household chores – such as cleaning toilets – while his brother works on a tobacco plantation. In addition to this kind of work, the two brothers will have dealt with racist insults and bullying while they were at this school, and only two years later, when Huang's parents arrived in the United States and realized the real situation they were subject to.
It was then that the family reunited and moved to Portland, Oregon, where Huang (thereafter) began his academic education that would lead him to study engineering at Oregon State University, where he met his current wife Lori Mills – with whom he is still married.
Huang completed his course in 1984 while working at some Silicon Valley companies, taking a master's degree in electrotechnical engineering at Stanford University. It was not until April 1993 that, accompanied by Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, Huang founded Nvidia and took over as CEO.
Despite some difficult years at first, Nvidia has become a reference in the field of semiconductors and graphics cards, carrying out an authentic “revolution” in the area of Artificial Intelligence in recent years.