Jensen Huang is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia Corporation — the world's most valuable semiconductor company, which he built from a Denny's booth in 1993 with $600 in combined cash. Born in Taipei, raised between Thailand and rural Kentucky, Huang is the longest-serving CEO of any S&P 500 technology company. His two-decade gamble on CUDA software created the unassailable moat that made Nvidia the backbone of the global AI revolution. He personally delivered the first AI supercomputer to OpenAI in 2016. As of 2026, Nvidia surpasses $5 trillion in market cap, generates $216 billion in annual revenue, and Huang's net worth stands at approximately $170 billion. The leather jacket is optional. The legacy is not.
On March 31, 2026, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history — $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anchored by Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), with continued participation from Microsoft and a sweeping syndicate of global institutions, the round dwarfs every prior private tech raise and cements OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup by a wide margin. The company is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, counting 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, and is widely expected to pursue an IPO.
OctoAI (formerly OctoML) was a Seattle-based AI infrastructure company founded in 2019 by University of Washington researchers — including Apache TVM creator Tianqi Chen and CEO Luis Ceze. The company built a generative AI inference platform that gave developers fast, affordable API access to leading open-source LLMs and image generation models, along with OctoStack, an enterprise-grade private AI deployment stack. After raising ~$132M and pivoting from ML optimization to GenAI infrastructure, OctoAI was acquired by NVIDIA in September 2024 and wound down its commercial services by October 31, 2024.