Bob
Sherbin

There is a moment every time Jensen Huang walks onstage at a major technology event - CES, GTC, Computex - where the room holds its breath. The CEO of NVIDIA doesn't just present; he performs. Behind the preparation for those moments, and the thousands of press calls, product announcements, and crisis communications that never make the stage, is a team. At the top of that function sits Bob Sherbin.

Sherbin has been NVIDIA's VP of Corporate Communications since February 2009, a role created specifically for him. When he joined, NVIDIA was a strong GPU company best known for gaming cards and graphics chips. What followed was one of the most extraordinary corporate transformations in tech history - from gaming hardware maker to the backbone of the global AI infrastructure. Sherbin has been shaping that narrative the entire way through.

He does this from Jerusalem, Israel - which is itself a detail worth sitting with. The VP of Communications for a Santa Clara, California semiconductor company, headquartered deep in Silicon Valley, works from the ancient capital of a Middle Eastern nation. This is not incidental. NVIDIA's footprint in Israel is enormous; the $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox in 2019 brought hundreds of Israeli engineers and researchers into the fold. Sherbin's presence in Jerusalem reflects something deliberate about the company's commitment to its Israeli operations, and something equally deliberate about who Bob Sherbin is as a person.

He is someone who has always planted himself somewhere unexpected.

Bob Sherbin graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1979. Not the most famous institution, but one with a quiet character - small, individualized, built for people who want to think rather than just credential. He chose it specifically to avoid, as he described it, "heading off to 13th grade with really great sports." He was looking for something intimate. He found it. He also found a professor named Bogart, whose English class struck him immediately: "It was love at first sight. I was absolutely staggered, entranced with English."

Before he graduated, he received a Watson Fellowship - one of the most selective post-graduation grants in American higher education, designed to fund a year of independent study abroad. He described it as the most formative experience of his life. It is the kind of experience that either confirms who you already were, or completely reshapes who you become. For Sherbin, it did both.

He then pursued graduate studies in journalism at Northwestern University and began his career the way many American journalists of his generation did: at the bottom, on the night police beat in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Night crime in a mid-sized Pennsylvania city is not glamorous. It is, however, the kind of reporting that teaches you to ask the right question under pressure, to write on deadline, and to talk to people who don't want to talk to you. He advanced within two years to senior feature writer.

Then came Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. The Cold War was still very much alive, and Sherbin found himself covering Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - places where the information flowing out was controlled, contested, and politically dangerous. This was not corporate communications. This was journalism in an environment where the truth had geopolitical weight.

From Radio Free Europe, Sherbin moved into financial and business journalism with Dow Jones News Service. He became bureau chief in Hong Kong, then Stockholm, then New York - three cities that represent different centuries of global commerce and each demanding a completely different cultural register. Hong Kong in the 1990s was a financial pressure cooker on the eve of the handover. Stockholm required a Nordic sensibility, patience, and precision. New York was everything, all at once.

This was followed by a transition that many veteran journalists make but few execute with such breadth: moving from news gathering into communications. Sherbin held senior roles at Merrill Lynch and HSBC, working across both the U.S. and Asia-Pacific. These were not boutique companies. These were institutions managing trillions in assets and commanding global press attention. The skills were the same; the vantage point had shifted.

Then came Hewlett-Packard, where Sherbin spent four-and-a-half years as VP of External Communications. His tenure there included one of the most complex corporate communications challenges of the decade: HP's acquisition of EDS, the technology services giant founded by Ross Perot. A deal that size, with that history, requires extraordinary management of narrative across multiple stakeholders - employees, analysts, press, regulators, customers. Sherbin ran that communications effort.

In February 2009, NVIDIA announced that Bob Sherbin was joining as VP of Corporate Communications - a newly created position. He brought with him more than 25 years of combined journalism and corporate communications experience, and he was tasked with strengthening NVIDIA's overall corporate communications and external messaging. He reported to Dan Vivoli, NVIDIA's Senior VP of Marketing.

What made the hire interesting in retrospect is the timing. In 2009, NVIDIA was a leading GPU company dealing with the fallout of the financial crisis and fierce competition in the graphics market. The AI era had not yet arrived. The transformer architecture was four years away from publication. The CUDA platform was just beginning to find use cases beyond gaming. Sherbin came aboard to tell the story of a company that had not yet fully discovered what its story would become.

Over the next fifteen-plus years, that story changed completely. NVIDIA's GPU architecture turned out to be precisely what machine learning required. CUDA became the standard compute platform for AI research. The data center business eclipsed gaming. Market capitalization climbed from the billions to the trillions. Through all of it - the product launches, the acquisition announcements, the earnings calls, the geopolitical pressures on chip supply chains - Sherbin has been managing the words that NVIDIA puts out to the world.

Sherbin's role at NVIDIA isn't just about press releases. It's about managing the perception of a company that now sits at the center of some of the most consequential technology decisions being made by governments, corporations, and militaries around the world. When AI regulation debates heat up in Washington or Brussels, NVIDIA's communications team is in the room. When a major cloud provider announces a new GPU cluster, NVIDIA's messaging shapes how that story is told. That is Sherbin's domain.

In October 2017, he authored a blog post about the inaugural GTC Israel conference - a gathering that brought Jensen Huang and hundreds of Israeli technologists together to discuss accelerated computing, VR, AI, and autonomous machines. The post reflected his dual role: communications executive and on-the-ground presence in a country where NVIDIA was rapidly expanding its research footprint. His Jerusalem base was already, at that point, a strategic asset.

Two years later, with the Mellanox acquisition, that asset became even more visible. NVIDIA was absorbing an Israeli high-performance computing company with deep roots in the country's tech ecosystem. Sherbin helped manage the external narrative around a deal that would reshape NVIDIA's data center business and its relationship with Israeli industry.

In 2022, Bob Sherbin established a new fellowship at Kalamazoo College. He named it the Jerry Sherbin Fellowship, after his father. The fellowship provides graduating seniors at Kalamazoo College with a stipend to spend an academic year after graduation independently pursuing a subject of deep personal interest - outside the United States.

The structure mirrors the Watson Fellowship that Sherbin himself received decades earlier - the one he called the most formative experience of his life. The intent is clearly personal: he experienced something transformative, and he wants to make that experience available to others. The naming after his father adds another layer. This is not a vanity gift; it is a memorial to family, filtered through a belief in the power of curious, solitary, international exploration.

"It's my hope that the fellowship will enable students to widen their perspectives, taking them from DeWaters to Da Nang," Sherbin said. DeWaters is a building at Kalamazoo College. Da Nang is a city in Vietnam. The gap between those two coordinates is approximately the distance Sherbin has traveled in his own life - and the distance he wants to make possible for others.

There is something quietly unusual about a VP of Corporate Communications at one of the world's most powerful technology companies spending his philanthropic energy not on a tech incubator or a scholarship for engineers, but on a fellowship explicitly designed to send young people into the world with no agenda except curiosity. It says something about who Bob Sherbin is, and where his priorities actually sit when the press releases are closed.