Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth swells from $3 billion to $90 billion in five years

Five years ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang controlled a roughly $3 billion investment in the chipmaker. Following Thursday’s rise, which drove the stock to a record, his holdings now total more over $90 billion.

Nvidia posted first-quarter earnings that above expectations, with sales increasing by more than 200% for the third consecutive quarter, owing to strong demand for artificial intelligence processors.

Huang also provided a better-than-expected projection and told investors that the company expects insatiable demand for its AI graphics processing units, or GPUs. The company said that its customers, particularly large cloud enterprises, could see a significant return on their investment in the expensive processors.

“We are fundamentally changing how computing works and what computers can do,” Huang stated.

Huang owns approximately 86.76 million Nvidia shares, or more than 3.5% of the company’s outstanding shares. The stock surged more than 9% on Thursday, closing at almost $1,038 per share, increasing the value of his investment by about $7.7 billion.

Nvidia shares have more than doubled this year, following a triple in 2023. They have increased around 28-fold in the last five years. Huang increased his position in 2022, when the price was at its lowest point prior to the AI boom.

Huang, 61, established the Silicon Valley business in 1993 to develop GPUs for 3D gaming. While gaming was Nvidia’s primary business for decades, the company has expanded into other areas such as cloud gaming subscriptions, the metaverse, and cryptocurrency mining processors.

Nvidia’s fortunes changed abruptly in late 2022, when OpenAI published ChatGPT, introducing the concept of generative AI to a wider audience. The invention demonstrated a future in which computers may not only acquire fresh information from databases, but also create new content and answers to questions from enormous caches of unsorted data.

OpenAI does the majority of their AI development on Nvidia GPUs. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta invested billions of dollars on AI research and development, necessitating the use of cutting-edge hardware to generate models.

Huang has been Nvidia’s spokesperson and primary seller, continually promoting the potential and power of using the company’s GPUs to construct AI.

Nvidia, which has been developing AI software and tools for more than a decade, is now in a strong position to become the leading supplier to the world’s largest technology companies. The business currently controls over 80% of the AI chip industry, and Huang is one of the world’s top 20 richest people.