How Did Jensen Huang Start NVIDIA?

Since co-founding NVIDIA in 1993, Huang has guided it from a scrappy graphics-chip startup into a global technology powerhouse. He led the company to pioneer accelerated computing. For instance, the invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics, and ignited the era of modern AI. Under his leadership, NVIDIA’s stock has soared and its GPUs now power everything from blockbuster video games to state-of-the-art AI research.

In July 2025, it became the first publicly traded company to surpass a $4 trillion market valuation. In this article, you’ll learn the inspiring story of how his vision and perseverance took him from humble beginnings to co-founding NVIDIA. In addition, we will reveal how he transformed it into an industry titan.

Early Career

Huang’s journey has been nothing short of unique. He began far from Silicon Valley. Born in 1963 in Taiwan and raised in difficult circumstances, he emigrated to the United States as a child. He once recalled feeling both scared and sad as he landed in America, but also fascinated by the big and beautiful world around him. His family moved frequently. At one point, he was sent to a boarding school in rural Kentucky for difficult children.

There, his daily chore was to clean the toilets in the dormitory. It was a humbling start, but Huang later said this experience was defining. It taught him to do his level best in everything. By age 15, he had become a champion table tennis player. He even placed third in the junior doubles at the U.S. Open Table Tennis Championship. These early challenges instilled in him a strong work ethic and perseverance.

After high school, he excelled academically. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984 and then pursued a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University, graduating in 1992. Even as a student, he stood out. His teachers recognized his exceptional drive and intellect. With his degrees in hand, he began working in the semiconductor industry.

He designed microprocessors at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and later joined LSI Logic, a growing semiconductor firm. It was at LSI Logic, a hot Silicon Valley startup at the time, that he gained broad experience. There, he gained experience not only in engineering but also in marketing and management. Crucially, it was at LSI that he met two fellow engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, who shared his enthusiasm for graphics technology and would soon become his co-founders at NVIDIA.

Throughout these years, his immigrant background and early struggles remained a source of motivation. He has spoken about how the humility of his past shaped his leadership style. For example, he has noted that NVIDIA’s founding came so late in the PC graphics era that it was effectively the world’s last computer graphics company to have been founded. But even so, he and his co-founders believed in themselves.

As he once told the BBC, “It didn’t matter to us whether people believed in us. We believed in ourselves. We had the courage to follow our own path.”. This confidence and gritty determination would become hallmarks of his leadership.

Founding Moment in 1993

By the early 1990s, Huang and his LSI colleagues Malachowsky and Priem began to believe that personal computers were on the verge of a revolution. Even though gaming was seen as a niche market at the time, the trio envisioned a future where PCs would become powerful consumer machines and 3D graphics would play a key role. In a later interview, he explained their thinking.

“This is now 1993. The PC revolution really started in 1995. The one thing you would do with the PC more than anything in the world is play games. Maybe 3D graphics would be the thing that’d be really cool.” None of them had a deep background in graphics, but they believed there was a timely opportunity. At that time, PCs were becoming fast enough and cheap enough to bring immersive graphics into the home.

Motivated by this vision, Huang agreed to leave his secure job. Legend has it that on February 17, 1993, his 30th birthday, he showed up for work at the new startup that would become NVIDIA. The founding story has since become part of Silicon Valley lore. The three engineers often met at a booth in a San Jose Denny’s to sketch out their plan over Grand Slam breakfasts and endless cups of cheap coffee.

“We were not good customers,” Malachowsky later quipped that the founders would sit for hours drinking coffee as they dreamed up their future company. Initially, they called it NVision, but Huang suggested NVIDIA, inspired by the Latin word for envy. It was also a color allusion to green. The name stuck, reflecting their ambition to make technology that others would envy.

Turning their idea into a real company required capital. Huang famously found a lawyer to handle the incorporation who insisted on cash. The lawyer demanded $200 in cash to take the paperwork. In fact, he rummaged up $200 from his wallet, Malachowsky and Priem each chipped in $200 of their own, meaning NVIDIA’s initial capital was just $600.

They filed the papers on April 5, 1993, and took on the titles President (Huang), Chief Technical Officer (Priem), and Senior Vice President of Engineering (Malachowsky). It was a shoestring operation. One insider later noted they had just $600 in capital, and little else

The tech industry in 1993 was skeptical because the PC graphics market was already crowded with chipmakers, and nobody believed gaming would become a mainstream business. Huang and his partners had to start almost from scratch. They literally bought a Gateway 2000 PC and tore it apart to study how Windows and DOS worked.

But their faith in the PC’s future was unwavering. They understood that while multimedia features were nearly nonexistent on PCs at the time, unlocking smooth 3D graphics could be transformative. As Huang said, they started from first principles. That is, believing they could build the enabling hardware that would make today’s 3D gaming possible.

That moment marked the beginning of NVIDIA’s long journey. He often recounts that the founders felt they had no idea how to start a company and that building NVIDIA was a million times harder than they expected. They knew the odds were stacked against them. Huang has said their company was tackling a market challenge, a technology challenge, and an ecosystem challenge. They had approximately 0% chance of success. However, they plunged ahead.

With Huang providing leadership and vision, and with Malachowsky and Priem contributing engineering know-how, they were ready for anything. The tiny startup quietly began designing its first graphics chip, even as its founders worked out of a rented office in a strip mall.

Early Challenges

The early days of NVIDIA were a roller-coaster of challenges. The founders were young engineers with a bold idea but limited business experience. Their first product, the NV1, took about two years to develop, but it turned out to be a flop. The NV1 tried to do everything. For instance, it combined 3D graphics, 2D drawing, video, sound, game port functions, and more onto one chip.

As NVIDIA veteran Mark Stevens later described it, it was like a Swiss Army knife of a chip. In Huang’s words, “It was a great technology achievement. It was a terrible product.” Diamond Multimedia, a partner, tried selling the NV1, but it proved too ambitious. Out of the 250,000 units shipped, about 249,000 were returned. This nearly put NVIDIA out of business. The co-founders had bet the company on a chip that simply didn’t match market needs.

Around the same time, NVIDIA had also partnered with Sega to work on graphics for the next-generation game console. This partnership offered a potential lifeline, but it came with a catch. Microsoft had just launched Windows 95 and its new DirectX graphics APIs, which supported a different graphics architecture (triangles) than the one NVIDIA had chosen (quadrilaterals).

As such, NVIDIA was alone in the PC world using quadrilateral primitives, and the rest of the industry, dozens of companies were moving to triangles. In 1995, Jensen realized their company was making the wrong kind of chip for the PC market. He faced a desperate choice. To fulfill the Sega contract and go bankrupt, or break the contract and re-engineer their chip for triangles.

With tension high, he made a bold move. He went to Sega’s CEO and explained that if NVIDIA finished the console as planned, our company would be out of business. Amazingly, Sega agreed to let them off the hook. It even invested $5 million in the company to keep it alive. This injection, plus a radical redesign plan, gave NVIDIA one last chance.

With that lifeline, it pivoted back to the drawing board. Huang and his engineers dramatically compressed their design cycle. Instead of the usual 18-24 months, they somehow completed a new graphics chip in about seven months. They cut staff and ruthlessly focused all remaining resources on a single new chip. The result was the RIVA 128, a streamlined 3D graphics accelerator built for DirectX compatibility.

It launched in 1997 just as NVIDIA was down to its last month of cash. There were no safety nets left. As one saying went inside the company, “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.” In fact, Huang famously started many meetings by reminding his team of that motto, turning the grim reality into motivation.

The gamble paid off spectacularly. The RIVA 128 met a hungry market. Gamers and PC manufacturers snapped it up. They sold a million units in four months, far outpacing any previous product. This one chip “was so much better than existing graphics chips that it faced no direct competitors,” wrote Peter Cohan. It paved the way for NVIDIA’s 1999 IPO.

Huang later looked back on this second chance as the defining moment that ensured the company’s survival. In interviews, he has reflected that the pain and suffering of those early years, sleepless nights, near-bankruptcy, and learning from failure were essential to building the company’s culture and resilience. Resilience is key to success, he told Stanford students in 2024, arguing that greatness comes from people who have suffered through adversity.

Breakthrough Successes

Once past the brink, NVIDIA’s started making money, and its growth accelerated. In 1999, it introduced the GeForce 256 graphics card. Branded as the world’s first GPU, a term NVIDIA itself popularized, the GeForce 256 was more than just another graphics card. The GeForce 256 ushered in true 3D acceleration for PC gamers, handling transform and lighting calculations in hardware to relieve the CPU.

As one reviewer noted at the time, it allowed games to render far more polygons and details without slowing down. Gamers who booted up titles like Quake III Arena on a GeForce 256 felt the revolution. NVIDIA had effectively redefined computer graphics, turning gaming PCs into powerful visual platforms.

Dominating Graphics and Entertainment

It continued innovating rapidly in the graphics arena through the 2000s. Its GeForce line dominated the PC gaming market, and graphics features once thought possible only on workstations became standard on home PCs. By the mid-2000s, NVIDIA was the go-to choice for gamers, film studios, and design professionals. Hollywood blockbusters such as Avatar and Iron Man relied on NVIDIA’s GPUs to power their special effects.

In 2006, NVIDIA took graphics to the next level of computing with CUDA. It was a new parallel-computing platform that let scientists, engineers, and programmers use GPUs for all kinds of data-intensive tasks. With CUDA, it opened its GPU silicon to fields far beyond gaming. It enabled researchers to accelerate simulations, physics, and deep learning algorithms using graphics hardware.

That strategic bet on general-purpose GPU computing set the stage for NVIDIA’s biggest breakthrough, the power for artificial intelligence. In 2012, an AI milestone proved its GPUs could literally change the future. For instance, a graduate student named Alex Krizhevsky used a deep neural network running on NVIDIA GPUs to win the ImageNet image-recognition competition.

His neural network, known as AlexNet, crushed all competition and demonstrated that GPUs were perfect engines for deep learning. This event is often seen as the dawn of modern AI in the tech era. Overnight, industries from tech to automotive to healthcare recognized that NVIDIA’s chips could accelerate AI tasks by orders of magnitude. Huang’s early vision that GPUs could do more than render graphics was vindicated spectacularly.

Powering the AI Revolution

In the 2010s and early 2020s, NVIDIA became synonymous with AI infrastructure. The company built a range of data-center GPUs and supercomputers, like the DGX series, aimed at training large AI models. Every major cloud provider and research lab adopted NVIDIA’s GPUs for deep learning.

By 2022, it had become a bellwether for the AI boom. Its hardware powered the training of language models like GPT-3 and computer vision systems, and its software platforms were at the core of generative AI. Indeed, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded in popularity, it was built on NVIDIA GPUs. In 2025, Huang remarked onstage that generative AI was a brand-new industry, and his company was squarely at the center of it.

Along the way, NVIDIA continued delivering for gamers and creators. In 2018, it launched the RTX line of GPUs with specialized ray-tracing cores and AI-enhancing tensor cores. It enables photorealistic lighting in games and real-time AI features like DLSS upscaling. Its GPUs accelerated not only gaming but also emerging fields like virtual reality and autonomous vehicles.

Today, NVIDIA’s headquarters campus in Santa Clara reflects the scale Huang has built. The company employs tens of thousands worldwide and makes some of the most powerful chips on the planet. Observers note that in the span of three decades, Huang has transformed NVIDIA. It grew a one-product startup into the center of a $4 trillion AI-industrial complex.

Conclusion

Jensen Huang’s journey from an immigrant kid cleaning bathrooms in Kentucky to leading one of the world’s most valuable tech companies is nothing short of mind-blowing. His story is a testament to resilience, vision, and the courage to challenge the odds. When NVIDIA started in 1993 with $600 and a dream, no one believed PC graphics would ignite a global transformation. Yet he saw what others didn’t. He persevered through failure, near-bankruptcy, and relentless competition.

Today, NVIDIA powers the engines of gaming, AI, and supercomputing, shaping the technologies that define our future. For Huang, the formula was simple but profound. Think from first principles, never stop innovating, and embrace the pain that forges strength. His story proves that greatness isn’t about avoiding failure. It’s about using it as fuel. And in that sense, NVIDIA’s rise is as much a story of grit as it is of genius.