NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang was today named to TIME’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Huang will be featured on the cover of
TIME’s print publication — one of only seven on the list to receive a cover — which hits newsstands on Sept. 17.
The 2021 TIME100 list includes political leaders like Joe Biden and Mario Draghi; creative figures like Scarlett Johansson and Steven Yuen; and sports icons like Simone Biles and Tom Brady. The only business tech figures on the list, besides Huang, are Tim Cook and Elon Musk.
The magazine cites Huang as “among the world’s most technically savvy CEOs,” and “a compassionate steward of his employees and a generous supporter of education in science and technology.”
Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
Starting out in PC graphics, NVIDIA helped build the gaming market into the largest entertainment industry in the world today. The company’s invention of the GPU in 1999 made possible real-time programmable shading, which defines modern computer graphics, and later revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.
Huang is a recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award; IEEE Founder’s Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. In 2019, Harvard Business Review ranked him No. 1 on its list of the world’s 100 best-performing CEOs over the lifetime of their tenure. In 2017, he was named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year.
Prior to founding NVIDIA, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.