NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang to Give Caltech's 130th Commencement Address
Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang, Founder and CEO of technology company NVIDIA will deliver the keynote address at Caltech's 130th Annual Commencement Ceremony on June 14, 2024.
Named the world's best CEO by Fortune, The Economist, and Brand Finance, Huang led NVIDIA to become a pioneer in accelerated computing and the fourth most valuable company in the world.
"As NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang has led a revolution in computation and artificial intelligence," said President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "His personal story underlies these accomplishments and provides a touchpoint for our students as they embark on the next stages of their careers."
Huang translated a childhood passion for computer gaming into a career of innovation, business development, and entrepreneurship, and, in doing so, is at the cutting edge of a technological revolution that is leading profound societal change.
He was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1963 and lived in Thailand for part of his childhood. When he was nine, he and his brother moved to Tacoma, Washington, to live with their uncle. After Huang's parents were able to immigrate to the U.S., Huang and his brother reunited with them in Oregon. He attended Aloha High School, where he graduated at the age of 16 while also a nationally ranked table-tennis player. He completed his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and worked at LSI Logic, and Advanced Micro Devices during the early part of his career. In 1992, he received his master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to take advantage of the growing demand for 3D graphics and visualization technology that accompanied the rapidly expanding PC and gaming industries.
The company initially focused on the development of microprocessors capable of providing high-quality 3D graphics. It is credited for inventing the graphics processing unit or GPU, which leveraged parallel computing to handle mathematical operations more efficiently than the more general central processing units, or CPUs. NVIDIA's RIVA 128 was the first GPU to integrate 3D, 2D, and video acceleration, leading to the company's widespread recognition.
NVIDIA's success extended beyond gaming. Due to their enormous computing potential, the company's GPUs have since catalyzed the advancement of applications other than graphics, most notably in the area of artificial intelligence (AI). Coupled with the company's supercomputing software package, CUDA, NVIDIA technology enabled programmers to create AlexNet, a powerful neural network used for image recognition and classification that won the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. NVIDIA's dedicated AI supercomputers also were responsible for training models used by ChatGPT.
Huang's sights are now set on combining NVIDIA's computer graphics research with its generative AI research to create the "Omniverse," a platform capable of simulating the real world to create "digital twins" that could be used for safely training robots and self-driving cars, among other applications.
Huang is listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people and has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He is the recipient of the Robert N. Noyce Award from the Semiconductor Industry Association; the IEEE Founder's Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. The Denny's restaurant just outside of San Jose, California, where Huang invited Malachowsky and Priem to discuss what would become NVIDIA, honors the occasion with a plaque.
Equally admired for his philanthropy, Huang and his wife, Lori—also an alum of Oregon State University—donated $50 million to help establish the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex at OSU. They donated $30 million to Stanford University to help support construction of the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center and $2 million for the Jen-Hsun Huang Hall at the Oneida Baptist Institute, Huang's childhood alma mater.
For more information about Caltech's 130th Annual Commencement, visit commencement.caltech.edu.
