Jensen Huang
Co-founder and CEO, Nvidia
CUDA, and the hardware the entire AI industry runs on
Rating
97Impact score
Domains
GPUsCUDAAI infrastructure
Scouting report
Co-founded Nvidia in 1993 to build graphics chips for games, then funded CUDA, a way to run general computation on them, long before there was a market for it. When deep learning arrived, the hardware and the programming model were already there. The open source relationship is two-sided: the proprietary Linux driver drew Torvalds’ famous 2012 insult, and the kernel modules were opened in 2022.
Curator’s note
Spent a decade funding a bet on a market that did not exist yet.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Jensen Huang by The White House, licensed Public domain.
Sources
- 01Jensen Huang en.wikipedia.org
- 02CUDA en.wikipedia.org
- 03Nvidia open GPU kernel modules github.com