Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Isn't The Only One Scoring Big, Thanks To Rising Stock

Forbes

The next industrial revolution has begun,” Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang said last month, during Nvidia’s quarterly earnings call. “Companies and countries are partnering with Nvidia to shift the trillion-dollar installed base of traditional data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center, AI factories, to produce a new commodity, artificial intelligence.”  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2024/06/16/these-10-nvidia-shareholders-have-gotten-36-billion-richer-in-a-month/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Today on Forbes, these NVIDIA shareholders have gotten $36 billion richer in a month.

00:08Last month, during NVIDIA's quarterly earnings call, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang

00:14said quote,

00:15The next industrial revolution has begun. Companies and countries are partnering with

00:20NVIDIA to shift the trillion-dollar installed base of traditional data centers to accelerated

00:25computing and build a new type of data center, AI factories, to produce a new commodity,

00:31artificial intelligence.

00:34No one has benefited more from NVIDIA's meteoric rise than Huang. Five years ago, he was worth

00:39an estimated $4 billion, ranked No. 546 richest on Forbes' World Billionaires list. Just over

00:47a year ago, he was worth $21 billion, ranked No. 76 in the world. Now, with NVIDIA's market

00:53capitalization surpassing $3.2 trillion, he's the No. 12 richest person on Earth,

01:00worth $115 billion, mostly thanks to his nearly 4% stake in the company.

01:06While Huang is the best-known shareholder of NVIDIA, there are plenty of others who

01:10have personally benefited from the rising stock. Among the biggest gainers are five

01:14other top executives, including Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress and General Counsel

01:19Tim Teeter, plus four independent board members who together own more than $10 billion worth

01:25of stock.

01:27One of those board members is billionaire Mark Stevens, who first got involved with

01:31NVIDIA in 1993, the same year the fledgling chip company was founded. He was a newish

01:37partner at Sequoia when the firm's founder, Don Valentine, got a call from LSI Logic founder

01:42Wilfred Wilf Corrigan. According to Stevens, Corrigan told Valentine,

01:48quote, There's this kid who works at LSI, and I'm sorry to see him go. You guys should

01:52look at him.

01:54Valentine and Stevens met with Huang, who pitched them on the idea of a company designing

01:583D graphics chips for PC games. Stevens says, quote, And we thought, intriguing.

02:05Sequoia put $1 million into the company, part of an investment that valued the firm at just

02:10$7 million, according to PitchBook. Stevens, who had worked at Intel and was Sequoia's

02:16young semiconductor expert, joined the NVIDIA board. He left in 2006 at a time when Sequoia

02:22partners were stepping off public company boards to focus on private companies. In 2008,

02:28Stevens began to wind down at Sequoia, and Huang invited him to rejoin the board. Largely

02:33because of Sequoia's early investment, Stevens now owns $5 billion worth of NVIDIA shares.

02:40Current venture capitalist and former tech executive Brooke Sewell was convinced by another

02:45tech executive, Harvey Jones, to join NVIDIA's board in 1997. The two men got to know each

02:51other while Sewell was senior vice president of finance and operations at Synopsys, where

02:56Jones was CEO. Sewell recalls that NVIDIA, quote, was in the graphics semiconductor space,

03:03which was a hyper-competitive space, and the CEO was barely over 30. He hadn't even been

03:08a VP before he founded the company. I looked at it and said, boy, this doesn't seem likely.

03:14However, Jones, who joined the board in 1993, was persuasive, and NVIDIA was in search of

03:20someone with expertise in finance and taking a company public, which Sewell had done at

03:24Synopsys. Sewell now owns $700 million of its shares.

03:31Early on, it wasn't so obvious that NVIDIA would end up doing so well. NVIDIA's first

03:36chip, released in 1995, had failed. Partway through developing its second chip, Huang

03:42and the team decided the architecture was all wrong, and they stopped work on it, according

03:46to a podcast from the VC firm Sequoia. Board member Stevens says, quote,

03:52Between 1993 and 1997, we almost went bankrupt three times.

03:58NVIDIA turned things around, and its third chip was a success. In the early 2000s, it

04:03developed the world's first graphics processing unit, or GPU, which became hugely popular

04:08for rendering images in video games. In the past decade or so, NVIDIA found that

04:13AI researchers, in both the corporate and academic worlds, were using its GPUs to run

04:18neural networks, a foundation of AI, and to create homegrown supercomputers. That helped

04:24fuel the decision to bet on AI computing, before there was a demonstrated market. That

04:30bet has paid off in spades. For full coverage, and to see our list of

04:36the 10 current NVIDIA directors and executives who have gotten the richest from their holdings

04:40and share sales, which are up a cumulative $36 billion in the past month, check out Phoebe

04:46Liu and Carrie A. Dolan's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks

04:53for tuning in.

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