With a market cap topping $5 trillion, Nvidia has become the shining star of the artificial intelligence boom—minting enormous wealth for investors and many of its employees. But for the chipmaker’s over 42,000 workers, success comes with high expectations.
According to CEO Jensen Huang, part of Nvidia’s edge stems from a management style he’s described as torturous—one he said he learned, in part, from his Taiwanese parents.
“[To a] Taiwanese parent, nothing is ever good enough, and you can’t go a day without some criticism,” he told Singapore-based news channel CNA. “And I’m kind of the same way. You can’t show me something without me giving you some criticism. And I guess in a lot of ways that’s my form of torture.”
Huang said he believes feedback works best when delivered immediately, and with improvement (not punishment) in mind.
“Just like a Taiwanese parent, once the feedback is given, you’re back to loving the person again,” Huang said. “And so, I’m always critical of everybody’s work so that I can help them be better.”
Nvidia’s brutal culture appears to be working: employees stay for years, while Jensen Huang works seven days a week #
Huang pointed to Nvidia’s high retention rates as evidence that the demanding culture works.
During fiscal year 2025, Nvidia’s overall turnover was just 2.5%, according to the company’s latest sustainability report. Roughly one in five employees have been with the company for at least a decade, while two in five have stayed for five years or longer.
“People don’t quit easily from Nvidia,” he said. “…I think that ultimately the purpose of leadership is to create the conditions for other people to realize their dreams, to be part of yours of course and to be part of something bigger, but to be able to turn their job, their profession, their craft hopefully into their life’s work. And at NVIDIA you could do that.”
Plus, even though Huang has sky-high expectations for Nvidia employees, he appears to hold himself to an ever tougher standard.
The 63-year-old billionaire has not only acknowledged he isn’t big on work-life balance. He works seven days a week—including weekends and holidays—driven in part by fear that Nvidia, the company he cofounded at a Denny’s booth in 1993, could fail at any moment.
But even as many people his age begin thinking about retirement, Huang said stepping away isn’t on his radar.
“I would like to work as long as I can,” he told CNA. “I hope to die on the job. That would be a dream come true.”
Overall, Huang’s aggressive approach to work has been successful. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, released last week, Nvidia’s revenue hit a record $81.6 billion—up 20% from the previous quarter and up 85% from a year ago. The company’s success has largely been fueled by the boom in data centers, where revenue climbed to $75.2 billion, up 92% year over year.
Huang’s net worth is estimated at $178 billion. Fortune reached out to Nvidia for further comment.
Lisa Su and Steve Jobs have demanding leadership styles too #
Huang isn’t the only Silicon Valley executive to argue that growth often comes from discomfort.
Rival tech CEO Lisa Su—who is also a distant cousin of Huang—has spoken openly about the importance of leaning into difficult challenges rather than avoiding them.
“Run towards the hardest problems—not walk, run—and that’s where you find the biggest opportunities, where you learn the most, where you set yourself apart, and most importantly, where you grow,” the AMD leader said in a commencement address last year, recalling the best career advice she ever received.
“When you choose the hardest challenges, you choose the fastest path to growth and the greatest chance to make a difference,” Su added.
The idea that demanding leaders can bring out the best in employees was also echoed by the late Steve Jobs, who was known for his uncompromising standards at Apple.
“My job is to not be easy on people,” Jobs told Fortune in a 2008 interview. “My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better. How? Just by coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.”
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