Which CEO has been CEO of Nvidia since its founding in 1993?

Jensen Huang has been Nvidia’s president and CEO since he co-founded the company in 1993. He started Nvidia with electrical engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, formally incorporating it on April 5, 1993.

The founders believed graphics processing could solve demanding computing problems, with video games providing a large commercial market. Huang became CEO from the beginning, after previously working as a microprocessor designer at AMD and leading a division at LSI Logic.

Nvidia’s early years were difficult. Its first graphics approach struggled, and a $5 million investment connected to Sega helped the company survive. The RIVA 128 graphics chip, released in 1997, became a major turning point when Nvidia was reportedly close to running out of payroll cash.

People sometimes confuse Huang with Lisa Su, who leads AMD; they are also cousins. Huang’s three-decade tenure is unusual in Silicon Valley, especially because Nvidia evolved from a gaming-graphics specialist into a major supplier of GPUs used in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.