Jensen Huang

Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 17, 1963, and moved to the southern city of Tainan as a child. He is the younger of two sons of Huang Hsing-tai, a chemical engineer at an oil refinery, and Lo Tsai-hsiu, a schoolteacher. They were a middle-class Taiwanese family that relocated often, and were native speakers of Taiwanese Hokkien. Each day, Jensen's mother randomly selected 10 words from the dictionary to teach her sons English. When he was five years old, Huang's family moved to Thailand to support his father's refinery career and remained there for approximately four years. He attended Ruamrudee International School while in Bangkok.

In the late 1960s, Hsing-tai traveled from Taiwan to New York City to train under an air conditioning company and, after returning home, resolved to send his sons to the United States. At age nine, Jensen, despite not yet being able to speak English fluently, was sent by his parents to live in the United States. He and his older brother moved in 1973 to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, escaping widespread social unrest in Thailand. Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth, mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. In order to afford the academy's tuition, Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions.

When he was 10 years old, Huang lived with his older brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory. Each student was expected to work every day, and his brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm. Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English" and was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets every day, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. In 2002, Huang said he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".

Two years after Huang arrived in Oneida, his parents moved to the United States and settled in Beaverton, Oregon, after which the brothers withdrew from school in Kentucky to live back with them. As a teenager, Huang attended Aloha High School in Aloha, Oregon, where he excelled academically. He skipped two grades, graduated at age 16, and became a nationally ranked table-tennis player in addition to being a member of its mathematics, computer, and science clubs. In 1977, the school purchased an Apple II computer. Huang used the machine to play Super Star Trek, a text-based game, and to program in BASIC, creating his own version of Snake.

Beginning at age 15, Huang got his first job working the graveyard shift at a local Denny's restaurant as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter from 1978 to 1983. After high school, he chose to enroll at Oregon State University due to its low in-state tuition. He studied electrical engineering and graduated in 1984 with a bachelor's degree with highest honors. Huang later recalled, "I was the youngest kid in school, in class" and the only student who "looked like a child". Years later, while working as a microchip designer in Silicon Valley, he concurrently pursued graduate night classes at Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1992.

As of October 2026, Forbes estimates Huang's net worth to be over US$200 billion, making him the seventh-wealthiest individual in the world.

While at Oregon State University, Huang met his future wife, Lori Mills, who was his engineering lab partner at the time. They have two children, Spencer and Madison. Spencer launched a bar in Taipei in 2015 that was honored as one of the top 50 bars in Asia by Forbes. The bar closed in April 2021, and he is currently a product manager at Nvidia. Madison previously worked in the hotel industry and is currently director of product marketing at Nvidia.

The Huang family lived in ordinary middle-class starter homes in San Jose before Nvidia went public in 1999. In 2003, they moved to a larger house in Los Altos Hills, California, and they acquired a second home in Wailea, Hawaii, the following year. In 2017, a limited liability company reportedly linked to the Huangs acquired a mansion in San Francisco for $38 million.

Huang and AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su are relatives. His mother is the youngest sister of Su's maternal grandfather, making them first cousins, once removed. Huang was unaware of their familial connection until Su became AMD's CEO.

A December 2024 investigation by The New York Times reported that Huang had set up an intentionally defective grantor trust and a grantor retained annuity trust. It was estimated that these trusts and his foundation would reduce his family's estate tax by $8 billion.

Huang has dual Taiwanese and American citizenship. During his time at AMD in 1984, Huang, who grew up speaking Taiwanese Hokkien, began learning Mandarin Chinese in order to communicate with Chinese photomask workers employed at the company. He has said that he learned the language phonetically through regular conversations with his co-workers. He makes frequent visits back to Taiwan.

Huang and Taiwanese billionaire Charles Liang, co-founder of Supermicro, are longtime friends. Both companies were established in 1993 and have collaborated on products, with the latter utilizing Nvidia AI chips in its servers. Huang is also a close friend of TSMC founder Morris Chang.

Huang got a tattoo of an abstract version of the Nvidia logo when the company's stock price hit US$100, which he first publicly showed at the 2010 GPU Technology Conference. The Times of India described the tattoo, along with the black leather jacket he is frequently wearing, as "his signature style".

In an interview with Ezra Klein for The New York Times, Huang said in the context of offloading human skills to technology that he does not remember his own address, ZIP code, or phone number and he can live with it.

Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, established the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation in 2007 and donated $330 million of Nvidia shares. The foundation's assets, primarily Nvidia shares, have significantly appreciated, reaching a value exceeding $12 billion as of late 2025, placing it among the largest private foundations in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of its grants are allocated to donor-advised funds, including the GeForce Fund at Schwab Charitable. In June 2025, the Huangs contributed an additional $60 million in Nvidia stock to the foundation.

On October 14, 2022, Jensen and Lori Huang donated $50 million toward a new $213 million research and education center at Oregon State University. The center will house one of the nation's most powerful supercomputers, built around Nvidia's DGX SuperPOD and OVX SuperPOD systems, giving faculty the computing power to tackle complex research problems. Waste heat from the system's cooling will be repurposed to heat more than 500,000 square feet of building space on OSU's Corvallis Campus.

In early 2025, the foundation matched a $22.5 million fundraising effort by the California College of the Arts, contributing an equivalent amount to complete a $45 million campaign to address the institution's financial deficits and enrollment challenges, marking one of the largest individual gifts in the college's history. The foundation has also provided grants ranging from five to six figures to organizations including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, the Tides Center, the B612 Foundation, AI4ALL (promoting diversity in artificial intelligence), and Mental Health Innovations (developing technology-based mental health solutions). In accordance with Internal Revenue Service regulations for private foundations, the foundation disbursed $123 million in 2024 and was projected to distribute $369 million in 2025.

In 2026, Huang donated $10 million to relief efforts for the 2026 Nepal–Tibet floods.