Photo: Anderseidesvik / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
A few years ago, most people in Iowa had never heard of Nvidia. Now its chips are behind the data centers going up near Des Moines and Council Bluffs.
Jensen Huang co-founded the company in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, reportedly over a meal at a Denny’s in San Jose. Born in Taiwan, Huang came to the U.S. as a child and studied electrical engineering at Oregon State and Stanford.
For years Nvidia was known for graphics cards for video games. Its chips turned out to be very good at the math behind artificial intelligence, and when demand for AI took off after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Huang has run Nvidia for more than three decades, which is rare among tech founders. He is known for his black leather jacket and long keynote speeches. Microsoft, Google and Meta have all built big data centers in Iowa, and much of the hardware inside them comes from Huang’s company.
Kim Sanders writes for Clarion News Online.