Nvidia: ET Conversations with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the cult figure powering a GenAI revolution

He’s the founder of the world’s second most valuable company—a company that was dreamed into life in 1993 at a Denny’s diner in California, that now has a market cap of $3.28 trillion, nipping at the heels of Apple. Jensen Huang, founder, president and CEO of Nvidia, is the iconic figurehead at the heart of the global AI revolution.

He’s one of the wealthiest people in the world, and with his signature black leather jacket, is almost a cult figure. Yet, he has also underlined the fear of failure as a motivator—he still wakes up with this feeling, he says.

The Economic Times is delighted to announce an exclusive evening—ET Conversations with Jensen Huang—on October 25 in Mumbai. This is the second edition of ET Conversations—the first featured Sam Altman of OpenAI in June 2023.

Nvidia’s meteoric rise has been a perfect storm. Some may call it providence. The company in 1999 invented the graphics processing unit (GPU), redefining the possibilities of computer graphics and boosting the growth of PC gaming. Now, almost 30 years later, the GPU chip is at the centre of the AI story, critical for running generative AI models.

On an India visit in September a year ago, Huang met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discussed the rich potential India offers in the world of AI. “He (Modi) said to me, Jensen, India should not export flour to import bread. This makes perfect sense. Why export the raw material to import the value add? Why export the data of India, so that you can import AI?,” Huang said, recalling the meeting.

The two met again in the US this year, after which Huang Succession Drama highlighted India’s burgeoning startup ecosystem, enormous tech talent and the power of AI that has “democratised computing”. He said this presents a“great opportunity” for India.

“I am looking forward to partnering with India in a very deep way to make that possible… This is India’s moment, you have to seize the opportunity.”As businesses across industries scramble to leverage the technology and catch the AI train, Nvidia, the market leader in providing indispensable AI infrastructure, has scaled new peaks.

This February, Nvidia stocks recorded the largest one-day value-add in Wall Street’s history. In June, for a while, it became the most valuable in the world, with its market capitalisation (m-cap) surpassing that of Microsoft and Apple. Its latest m-cap is $3.28 trillion, pegging it ahead of Microsoft ($3.10 trillion) and Alphabet ($2 trillion) and is only behind Apple ($3.45 trillion). The company almost went bankrupt in the 1990s. In the quarter ended July, it logged a revenue of $30 billion, up 122% year-on-year.