Tech Fanboys Have a New Hero

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have each taken a turn as technology’s alpha dog, but none of them can claim that title now. Musk has become a polarizing figure, drained of all mystique. Zuckerberg sold us on a social-media dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Bezos self-ejected from the CEO chair at Amazon, so he could make rockets and frolic on his yacht with his fiancée. (Good for him.)

At the top of the tech world, a vacancy now looms like a missing tooth. In the months after ChatGPT was released, in November 2022, it seemed as though it might be filled by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI—but he doesn’t yet have the requisite longevity. (Zuckerberg was in a similar position in 2010, before he acquired Instagram and WhatsApp.) The AI boom has, however, produced another contender in Jensen Huang, the 61-year-old CEO of Nvidia. Rather than manufacture chatbots or self-driving cars themselves, Huang’s company develops the fantastically intricate chips that make them possible.

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Huang has a charming and thoroughly American origin story. A Taiwanese immigrant, he co-founded Nvidia in a Denny’s booth in 1993, and bought 20 percent of its shares for the $200 he had in his pocket. He served as its first chief executive officer—a position he has never relinquished or been forcibly ousted from—and, after some early stumbles, grew it into a formidable maker of PC graphics chips. In the early 2000s, Huang made a sustained bet on graphic processing units (GPUs). Because GPUs have proved so crucial to deep-learning applications and artificial intelligence more broadly, demand for them has spiked beyond all reason. Huang now looks like a visionary, and because it is difficult to spin up a major microchip company, his business has an oceanic moat.

Not many Americans buy Nvidia’s products directly, but during the past few years, they have nonetheless taken notice of the company’s stock price and, as a consequence, its CEO. Before NVIDIA’s earnings call on February 21, there were questions about whether it could sustain its hot streak of quarter-over-quarter growth. One day after Huang announced that Nvidia had once again beaten analyst expectations, the company posted the largest single-session gain in value in market history. Huang’s personal fortune alone grew by nearly $10 billion—he’s climbed 11 places on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List since January 1—and the rally wasn’t even over: On Monday, Nvidia’s market cap edged out Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, making good on the oft-heard claim that chips are the new oil. As of this writing, the only companies in the world that are more valuable than the chipmaker are Microsoft and Apple.

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Huang is not yet a household name. There is no Oscar-winning David Fincher film about him. He can still eat out at restaurants without being recognized, in the exurbs, certainly, but also in coastal cities. From the neck up, he is silver-haired and spectacled, and mostly looks his age. From the neck down, he has developed a distinctive and youthful fashion sense—an important prerequisite for any aspiring king of tech. Steve Jobs had his sleek black turtlenecks. Zuckerberg has his utilitarian hoodies and tees. Bezos reinvented himself with a jacked frame and a puffer vest. Onstage, Huang, who is an engaging but ultimately workmanlike performer, usually wears a black leather jacket. Sometimes it has a floppy collar. Sometimes it’s a collarless moto. (Either way, the menswear guy approves.) At some point, Huang also started going watchless. Why? “Because,” as he has said, many times, to interviewers and audiences alike, “now is the most important time.”

I don’t know what that quote means—presumably, some timekeeping device is always within his reach—but when I saw it posted on X (formerly Twitter) as though it were a pearl of the highest wisdom, I got a sense for the intensity of Huang’s emerging fandom. In the world of technology, stan culture often expresses itself in precisely this way: A CEO’s idiosyncratic thoughts about life or business are elevated to the status of Mao’s Little Red Book. Think of Zuckerberg’s pledge to “move fast and break things,” or Bezos’s legendary preference for written memos. That tech influencers and middle managers have lately started citing Huang-isms on LinkedIn—Did you know that he has 40 direct reports, doesn’t do regular one-on-one meetings, and thinks five-year plans are silly? —suggests that a similar cult of personality has formed.

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Huang has his epic market run, he has his devotees, and he has his drip. The only thing that may hold him back from achieving the generational, public-facing stardom of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg is the nature of Nvidia’s product. The company’s chips power all kinds of technologies that consumers are familiar with, but they’re largely imperceptible to the average person, because they’re inserted a few steps back in the supply chain. Huang presumably won’t soon be giving a keynote announcing a shiny new gadget or car that radically changes people’s lives. His chips won’t have Amazon’s ubiquity, on doorsteps or all the other places that its logo shows up in American life. He won’t be able to preside over the sublime spectacle of a rocket launch and re-landing. His role in our ever-more-automated world will always be a bit abstract. It will require some explanation. To some, he may always seem like the magician’s assistant, albeit one who is becoming very, very rich.

More than anything, Huang’s cultural ascension would reflect a deeply felt uncertainty about this AI moment. In the American imagination, our preeminent technologist is a potent symbol, not just of our current prosperity, but of where we think we are going. A great many of us now feel certain that AI will bring profound changes to our lives. But we don’t yet know which ones. We aren’t ready to pick winners. All that we know for sure is that they are going to need some serious computing power. And so, at least for a time, the chipmaker may be king.