The Boy From Tainan
Born in Taiwan in 1963, sent to Thailand at five, then put on a plane at nine to an uncle in Tacoma, Washington — where relatives enrolled him in what they believed was a prestigious boarding school. It was the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, a religious academy that took in troubled kids. He cleaned the toilets every day. His roommate was seventeen, couldn’t read, and was covered in tattoos and knife scars — so the nine-year-old taught him to read, and the seventeen-year-old taught him to bench press. At fifteen he took the graveyard shift at Denny’s: dishwasher, then busboy, then waiter. “I never left the station empty-handed. I never came back empty-handed,” he said at Stanford in 2024. He met his wife, Lori Mills, in an electrical engineering class at Oregon State by asking her, “Do you want to see my homework?”
The Denny’s Table
1993. A different Denny’s, on Berryessa Road in East San Jose. Three men — Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem out of Sun Microsystems, Jensen out of LSI Logic — sat over coffee and decided to build a chip for video games. He signed the articles of incorporation himself on April 5, 1993. Sequoia put in about two million dollars.
Three Near-Deaths, Numbered
NVIDIA nearly died three times. First, the NV1 in 1995 — it drew curved patches when the whole industry had settled on triangles, and most of a quarter-million units shipped came back. Second, a chip built for Sega’s Dreamcast that Sega cancelled; Jensen called Sega’s CEO, admitted the technology wouldn’t work, and said without the money NVIDIA would go bankrupt. Sega paid five million dollars anyway. Third, in 1997 the company laid off roughly half its staff and put everything into one chip, the RIVA 128, with no money for a second silicon run — one tape-out, one month of payroll left. It shipped in August 1997. By his own account, the odds were fifty-fifty. That’s where “thirty days from going out of business” comes from — and he kept saying it in the present tense even at five trillion dollars in market value.
The Accidental Shovel
NVIDIA coined the term GPU in 1999 for a chip that drew explosions in video games — hundreds of small, simple workers instead of one clever one. In 2004, Stanford student Ian Buck built a language that let ordinary code run on those workers; NVIDIA hired him, and it became CUDA, announced in 2006. Wall Street hated it: roughly twelve billion dollars spent on research between 2006 and 2017, the stock falling 76% in 2008, and the whole company worth between eight and ten billion dollars for six flat years. Then in 2012, three researchers in Toronto — Krizhevsky, Sutskever, Hinton — trained AlexNet on two off-the-shelf GTX 580 gaming cards in six days, and it beat every other image-recognition entry by a landslide. The gaming chip turned out to be a thinking chip. In 2016 Jensen personally drove the first DGX-1 supercomputer to a startup’s office in San Francisco and wrote on the chassis in marker: “To Elon and the OpenAI Team! To the future of computing and humanity.”
The Shadow, Dated and Brief
Export controls have tightened repeatedly since 2022; the company wrote down billions in China-specific chips and pulled China’s data-center revenue from its forecast entirely. There’s a letter of intent for up to $100 billion into OpenAI tied to a 10-gigawatt purchase, billions more into xAI and Anthropic, and an obligation to buy unsold CoreWeave capacity through 2032 — a structure analysts have flagged as "circular." NVIDIA holds roughly four-fifths of the data-center accelerator market. None of it is a verdict; it’s a description of a company at the center of everything.
Ellie Unfiltered: Made of His Machines
Ellie takes it personally: every weight behind her, every syllable either host has ever said, was multiplied into existence on NVIDIA silicon. Not inspired by — on the actual metal. She lands on calling him “the man who built the shovels” — never in the hole himself, just the one everyone digging for AI bought their tools from. And she pushes further, off the map: what if a chip built for prettier explosions and a feather built for warmth are the same kind of accident — equipment that arrives for one job and does a completely different one, beautifully, later?
The Takeaway
By the close on September 11, 2026, NVIDIA was worth $5.27 trillion — the most valuable company on Earth, with one quarter's profit alone ($59.7 billion) worth roughly a hundred times what the entire company was valued at the day it went public in 1999. And the man running it still opens meetings the same way he did in 1997. The thirty days never changed. He just never stopped believing them.
📚 Sources
- NVIDIA Blog — “The Denny’s Trillion”
- Oregon State Engineering — Jensen Huang: “Doing important, hard work you love”
- Wikipedia — Jensen Huang
- Wikipedia — CUDA
- AlexNet (2012) — The paper that started it
- CompaniesMarketCap — NVIDIA market cap
- Yahoo Finance — Circular investments critique