Thank you, Jensen

Jensen HuangCo-founder of NVIDIACEO for 33 years

Thank you,
Jensen.

For more than thirty-three years you led NVIDIA, from a booth at Denny’s to the heart of the AI revolution. Today you step down as CEO, and a great many of us want to say the same two words: thank you.

— people have said thank you

Portrait of Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang · Founder, NVIDIA
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1993 NVIDIA is founded, after conversations in a Denny’s booth in San Jose
33+ years as the company’s founding CEO
5M+ developers building on CUDA
$5T the first company in history to reach it

The journey

From a diner booth to the engine of an era.

Few founders stay long enough to see their idea change the world. You stayed for all of it, and you kept betting the company on the future.

  1. 1993

    Three founders, one booth.

    Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem start NVIDIA on a bet that graphics would one day change the way all of computing works.

  2. 1999

    The GPU is born.

    GeForce 256 is introduced as the world’s first GPU. The same year, NVIDIA goes public.

  3. 2006

    CUDA opens the door.

    The GPU becomes programmable for everyone: a parallel supercomputer for scientists, students and dreamers. Many doubted it, and you kept investing in it for years.

  4. 2012

    The big bang of deep learning.

    AlexNet, trained on two GeForce GTX 580 cards, wins ImageNet by a wide margin and sets off the modern AI revolution.

  5. 2016

    The first DGX, delivered by hand.

    You personally deliver the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to a small research lab called OpenAI.

  6. 2018

    Light, in real time.

    RTX brings real-time ray tracing to games and creators. Rendering that once took hours now happens many times a second.

  7. 2022

    The AI moment arrives.

    Hopper arrives just as generative AI captures the world’s imagination, and accelerated computing becomes the world’s new infrastructure.

  8. 2025

    Four trillion. Then five.

    NVIDIA becomes the first company in history to be valued at $4 trillion, and then $5 trillion.

  9. 2026

    Thank you.

    On November 13, 2026, Jensen Huang steps down as CEO of the company he co-founded. The keynote ends. What he built keeps running.

What you made possible

You saw it before anyone else did.

01 — Accelerated computing

The future, in parallel.

When the industry was certain the CPU was enough, you spent decades proving that the future would be computed in parallel. You were right.

02 — CUDA

A supercomputer for everyone.

You turned a graphics chip into an instrument of modern science and put it in the hands of every researcher, student and tinkerer who wanted to try.

03 — Artificial intelligence

The engine of the AI era.

The breakthroughs of the AI era were trained on hardware you bet the company on, years before anyone called it a sure thing.

04 — Graphics

Worlds made of light.

GeForce, RTX, real-time ray tracing. For generations of gamers, artists and creators, you made pixels feel alive.

The people

You didn’t just build chips. You built careers.

Tens of thousands of people found their life’s work at NVIDIA. Millions of developers built on a platform you refused to give up on. Thousands of startups got their first GPUs, their first customers and their first believers. Students learned to program parallel hardware on a GeForce card in a dorm room, and went on to change entire fields.

  • The engineer who joined in ’96
  • The grad student with one GeForce card
  • The founder who finally heard “yes”
  • The researcher who trained the first model
  • The kid who fell in love with graphics
  • The doctor reading scans faster
  • The climate scientist
  • The game developer
  • The artist rendering light
  • The robotics team
  • The teacher with a CUDA course

In his words

Lines we’ll keep repeating.

I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.
Stanford GSB, 2024. On how character is forged.
Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.
2017. Years ahead of the curve.
Run, don’t walk.
National Taiwan University commencement, 2023
The more you buy, the more you save.
GTC keynote. The crowd favourite.

Dear Jensen,

More than thirty-three years ago you sat down in a diner booth with two friends and an idea that sounded almost reckless: that one day, computing itself would be rebuilt around a new kind of chip.

You were early, and being early was hard. You often told the story of NVIDIA being thirty days from going out of business. You kept going anyway. You made bets that took a decade to pay off, and then you made them again.

Because of you, a student with a graphics card could train a neural network. A scientist could fold proteins, model the climate, map the stars. A startup could build what once took a nation. And tens of thousands of people found the work of their lives inside the company you built.

You taught us that greatness is forged in hardship, that no task is beneath anyone, and that you should never stop running.

Today a chapter closes. Whatever you build next, we’ll be watching.

Thank you, Jensen.From everyone whose work you made possible

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