FT Person of the Year: Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang

Key topics:Nvidia’s rise to world’s most valuable company amid AI boomHuang’s strategic bets, leadership style and global political influenceHow AI infrastructure demand is transforming industries and economiesSign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Richard Waters and Michael Acton in San Francisco.On his birthday in February, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and his wife were celebrating at home with cake when he noticed several missed calls from an unknown number.The tech boss at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom was about to ignore them when his phone rang again. “Hello Jensen: this is President Trump,” the voice said.As Huang’s dogs started to bark, drowning out the conversation, he initially thought it was a prank: “I said, ‘Really, is this President Trump?’” he tells the FT in an interview. The impromptu call turned into a 45-minute chat.For a tech executive who for most of his career had been little known outside Silicon Valley, where Nvidia’s chips were not even considered part of the technology mainstream, the call marked the start of an unusual relationship between Trump and the self-made executive, who is the son of Taiwanese immigrants.Huang’s move into the corridors of power bore fruit this week with the announcement that Nvidia will once again be allowed to sell advanced AI chips in China, something that has been opposed by many in the national security establishment.Chips were long the unloved stepchildren of the digital world, largely overlooked in favour of the devices they powered and the services that ran on them. But this year, they have emerged as the impetus behind the AI mania that is sweeping through the business and financial worlds.The FT is naming Huang as its person of the year because of the role he has played in this transformation. Huang has been at the centre of one of the biggest investment programmes ever conducted by the private sector — one that has both propped up the US economy and sustained a stock market boom. And he has been a driving force in the adoption of a technology that has the capacity to reshape entire industries.Nvidia is now the most valuable company in the world and, at one stage over the course of the year, it became the first to have a market capitalisation of more than $5tn (On Thursday evening, it was valued at $4.4tn). Huang himself is set to end 2025 with a net worth of more than $160bn, putting him in the ranks of the world’s 10 richest people. Even if it turns out that current valuations are inflated and the share price were to fall by a half, Nvidia would still be worth three times more than at the end of 2021.Huang, who has always cautioned that any lead in the tech world is fragile, would be the first to warn of the dangers of complacency. Chinese chipmaker Huawei has made impressive strides in advanced chip design, while some of the biggest tech companies, led by Google, are developing their own chips in competition with Nvidia.Three years after the launch of ChatGPT triggered a global AI race, however, Nvidia’s position at the forefront of AI chipmaking has proved remarkably resilient.If all this newfound prominence has pushed Huang into a public role as tech prophet and visionary, he is more than ready to take up the mantle. He calls Nvidia “one of the most consequential technology companies in history”, a statement made with the matter-of-factness that characterises many of his pronouncements.“The computer technique that took us 30 years to invent is now fundamentally changing all of computing,” he says. “We are in the process of building a whole new industry that produces digital intelligence.” 2025 will go down as the year that data centres entered the public consciousness. The race to build massive new computing facilities to feed future AI demand turned their construction into a bright spot for the sluggish economy, accounting for a significant chunk of the growth in US GDP. As the main supplier of AI chips, which account for around half of data centre costs, Nvidia’s fortunes have soared.For some critics, Huang’s decision to invest his company’s cash in other AI companies, including those of its own customers, amounts to a dangerous form of circular dealmaking that could artificially inflate demand for its chips.But Huang himself describes spreading the cash around as a way to seed a wider AI ecosystem. He says Nvidia’s investments have involved “billions of dollars, for a business that’s hundreds of billions”, making them too small to have much impact on overall demand: “It’s hardly sufficient to fund our customers’ purchases.”Since the summer, Nvidia has also made some dizzying promises, including to plough as much as $100bn into OpenAI in the coming years. As worries about a bubble have grown, other AI leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have warned openly about the risks. But Huang, with his typical engineering mindset, refuses to look beyond the dealmaking he has control over.“There’s a lot of fever in talking about investments, but the actual investors themselves are very disciplined,” he insists. “Most of the people that I’ve seen actually write the checks are fairly disciplined.”Huang really gets into his stride when he starts on the reasons for the spending — and how long it might last. The world’s digital infrastructure needs nothing less than a complete overhaul, he declares.“It took 60 years of computing to get here,” he says. “It’ll take longer than two years to modernise all the world’s computers.”Huang’s didactic style, quick to move into subjects that will challenge the average listener, has been on show repeatedly this year in a series of loosely scripted, marathon keynotes around the world. Attendees may not be au fait with the details of chip architecture and advanced software he likes to discuss, but his star power fills stadiums regardless. His distinctive leather jacket — a sparkly version of which made its debut earlier this year — has become a powerful personal brand in the style of Steve Jobs’ turtlenecks. A video of him linking arms with Samsung and Hyundai executives to down a beer went viral.“Manufacturing intelligence in real time is brand new in the world,” he says. “And every country will have it, every company will use it, and every industry will have it. This manufacturing industry is likely a few trillion dollars large, and it’s just brand new.” Nvidia was shaped by a series of gambles that others either did not see or were not prepared to risk. Huang puts these down to confidence in his own ability — bolstered by a small team of close lieutenants — to identify technical forces capable of reordering the world.“The ability to see the future and the ability to develop deep conviction for an idea ultimately comes down to the ability to reason down to the first principles,” he says. Huang says he “gut checks” his convictions “every single morning”.One of Huang’s first bets was that traditional chip designs would eventually fail to keep up with the growing demands on microprocessors. In his view, the architecture of Nvidia’s gaming chips would make them a potential successor, starting with the advanced computing needed for scientific research. Several years later came a second gamble, with a layer of software designed to open up the chips’ capabilities to a wider group of developers.Both were expensive ventures into new realms where there was little demand for them. “No customers ask for it. No competitors are building anything like it. And so you’re all by yourself, there’s no external confirmation,” says Huang. It was only later that machine learning emerged as the perfect application for his dream of scientific computing. The software layer, Cuda, has made it much easier for developers creating AI applications to work with Nvidia’s chips than with those of its rivals, turning it into one of the company’s main strategic weapons.Jay Puri, Nvidia’s sales chief and one of Huang’s closest lieutenants, says the chip world is littered with would-be visionaries predicting the future of tech, but Huang is rare in having the resolve to place a big bet and stay the course. “To have the dream is one thing but to execute on it is another,” he says. Once the tech boss got an idea it was hard to knock him off course, even when the years of investment hit profits and led activist investors to circle.In trying to explain the personal characteristics behind this, Mike Moritz, a former chair of Sequoia Capital, an early backer of Nvidia, points to the company’s brush with bankruptcy after the failure of its first chip. “The resilience, the tenacity, the brilliance” with which Huang dragged the company through the crisis were the first sign of the resolve that was to follow, he says.Sheer intensity has always played a part. “I work from the moment I wake up until I go to bed,” says Huang. “I have zero hobbies. Everything is, number one, take care of family, and then after that, 100 per cent work.”This voracious appetite for work and close attention to engineering detail has shaped a company with an unusually flat management structure that revolves around the CEO. Huang says that 50-60 of the company’s executives report to him directly — he isn’t sure of the exact number — and spurns traditional corporate hierarchies. “The way information travels is error-prone, and people don’t feel empowered,” he says.Part of the plan is to break down the centres of power seen in most other companies, where “people try to get power by holding on to information”, says Puri. “He doesn’t want people to be territorial.”Huang claims that this has bred a culture of resilience, and says he views Nvidia employees as “family”.Yet he is also an exacting boss, sometimes given to yelling at executives in front of others. Huang himself likes to make the public dressings-down sound strategic. The common management habit of issuing praise for employees publicly and only doling out criticism behind closed doors, he says, “is exactly the opposite of what you should do”. Far better to air problems publicly so that everyone can learn from failure. “That’s what we’re optimising for,” he says, as though any displays of temper are just one more engineering tweak.That is not how it feels to people who’ve been on the receiving end.“When he gets into it, he’s so intense it can feel personal,” says Puri. “But really it’s not about the person — he’s just very intense; it’s about whatever issue it is we are working out and need to improve.” The Nvidia boss is the first to admit that being propelled on to the geopolitical stage this year has proved a challenge. Political leaders and policymakers “don’t talk in technology, which is my native tongue,” he says.An electrical engineer by training, he has led the chipmaker since he and two allies founded it 33 years ago — a longer stretch than the CEO of any other leading tech company, a fact he relates with pride. (Michael Dell started earlier but took a hiatus from management). As recently as 2021, the majority of Nvidia’s business was in making graphics chips for gaming enthusiasts and Huang inhabited a relatively narrow, technical world.One of Huang’s biggest coups, however, has been his ability to deal with the Trump White House. As well as flattering the president during joint appearances, he has shown himself adept at the kind of dealmaking that is close to the president’s heart — first with a major chip sale to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to accompany a presidential visit to the region, then by agreeing to hand a percentage of Nvidia’s China sales to the US in return for export licences.The China breakthrough, in particular, has rankled opponents. “The strategy was full-on Trump flattery, there was nothing nuanced about it,” grouses one critic in Washington.Matching his efforts in Washington, Huang has also worked hard to win over the authorities in Beijing. Moritz credits his exhaustive “shuttle diplomacy”, which has also included Taiwan, where chips based on Nvidia’s designs are manufactured.Straddling the growing chasm between the US and China on tech policy has become increasingly difficult. In off-the-cuff comments last month, Huang predicted that China would win the AI race with the US — the kind of unguarded view he has generally been careful to keep to himself. He also exhibits a clear admiration for the technocratic drive behind China’s tech rise.“Chinese leaders are builders. They’re engineers,” he says. When it comes to AI, “they’re running fast, and regulation is very, very light”. By contrast, he adds, “most western leaders are lawyers, regulators. We’re trying to avoid problems before they even happen”.But if that sounds like a preference for Beijing’s handling of AI, he is quick to slip back into diplomatic-speak. “Every system has its advantages and disadvantages,” he says, pointing out there are also weaknesses in China’s approach (such as the tendency to create excess capacity in new industries).Critics question whether Huang can hope for any lasting advantage. “China is not going to be satisfied to be reliant on US semiconductors, they’ve been very clear,” says Chris McGuire, a former senior tech adviser in the Biden White House.To Huang, making Nvidia’s products indispensable in China is no different from holding its own in other markets. “I have some of the most formidable technology companies in the world competing with me, and I’m fairly certain what they would like to do is squeeze me out too,” he says. “We have to earn our right to be here.” When it comes to the way in which AI might change the world, Huang does not hew to some of Silicon Valley’s orthodoxies. It can sometimes feel as though the tech elite is split between “doomers” and “accelerationists” — the pessimists who worry that AI will go off the rails and cause catastrophic harm, and the optimists who want to rush ahead to new forms of superintelligence.Huang disdains both camps. He brushes off the doomers who have predicted that AI will bring cataclysmic job losses. So far, AI has taken on narrow parts of some people’s jobs, rather than throwing them out of work. “I think people are confusing the automation of tasks and the purpose of a job,” he says.At the same time, he has no patience with the futurism that often creeps into discussions about AI, with talk of new forms of intelligence that may one day surpass human capabilities. “The road map to an unspecifiable artificial general intelligence is less clear,” he says, adding, “nor do I think it’s that important”.Instead, he describes the next stage of AI as an engineering challenge — adapting the technology behind services like ChatGPT to make it of wider use. “AI is more than a chatbot,” he says. “AI covers a large swath of the world’s industries. I believe the odds of AI not delivering on broad scale industrial productivity is very, very low.”It all sounds so undramatic and so prosaic, particularly when set against the techno fantasies of someone like Elon Musk, who conjures up a future of space travel and armies of robot helpers.Huang is unapologetic. “I stay away from science fiction as much as I can,” he says. “I don’t think it’s helpful to fantasise about the future of artificial intelligence. It causes people to either over-invest or under-invest. I try to stay as practical as I can.”.Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw.© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.

FT Person of the Year: Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang

Related Stories

SA's "green mamba" passport is getting a chip, and a shot at more visa-free travel

Duarte da Silva: SA's richest goldmine is the bin — and almost nobody's mining it

Duarte da Silva: The country we declared explored

Nvidia enlists Wall Street titans to bankroll $500 billion AI buildout