Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth is up $27.5 billion this year to $182 billion. According to Bloomberg, that makes him the world’s eighth-richest person, just behind Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
It is not hard to see the reason for the jump. Nvidia’s stock is up 18% this year. Huang owns 4% of the company. Its market cap is $5.32 trillion, which makes it the most valuable public corporation in the world.
Huang has taken a graphics chip company from its 1993 founding to the world’s leader in AI chips. Some of his net worth is luck. AI evolved in a direction that positioned Nvidia chips. The importance of these chips became clearer in early 2024. According to CNBC on January 18, 2024, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Meta is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia’s popular computer chips, which are at the heart of artificial intelligence research and projects.” Nvidia’s stock traded at $68 before the statement. It trades at $220 today.
Nvidia not only holds 90% of the highest-end AI chip market, but it has also invested tens of billions of dollars in AI industry leaders, including Anthropic and OpenAI. Presumably, these positions will be worth much more over time. (Additionally, much of this money goes toward buying Nvidia chips, which ramps up its revenue.) Some investors object, but no accounting rules prevent it.
Furthermore, Nvidia has become a banker to the industry. Recently, it pledged as much as $105 billion to build a data center for OpenAI in Ohio.
Huang proves an old adage. Financially, very few people are an overnight success.
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