'Jensanity' In Taiwan: The Nvidia CEO Becomes The 'Taylor Swift Of Tech,' And 'Rock God Of AI'

07/06/2024

People love celebrities for a multitude of reasons.

From the fact that famous people are also aspirational figures, famous people also have a significant social status and validation. Not to mention, humans have always admired and revered individuals who stand out.

This is why celebrities can act like magnets, and that people around them will swarm them automatically.

Jensen Huang is not a celebrity, in a sense that he's a model or a movie star. He's not an athlete nor he is a musician.

He is an American businessman, electrical engineer, and the co-founder, president and CEO of Nvidia.

That, is enough to propel him to a rock star-like fame.

Jensen Huang.
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang in Taiwan, swarmed by crowds who see him as their idols.

The bespectacled 61-year-old man can be quickly be recognized from his grey hair and his signature black leather jacket.

And wherever he goes, crowds would gather and chant his name, and ask for selfies and autographs.

At least in Taiwan, Huang has posed for countless pictures and even scrawled his name on a woman's top, just below her cleavage.

This happened during his visit.

Huang, who was born in the southern city of Tainan, Taiwan's old capital, before migrating to the U.S. at the age of 9, has returned with love.

He became the subject of constant news on national television and was followed by reporters.

When he visited the Computex technology trading show, crowd gathered, and that he became a topic of conversation on thousands of social media posts.

"Who made the best graphics cards?" shouted Huang to a group of people who surrounded him.

"Nvidia!" they exclaimed back.

Every restaurant Huang visited was specially promoted by a broadcaster, which led to an increase in business for the business.

It was pure "Jensanity" as the locals describe it.

Jensen Huang.
Jensen Huang delivers his keynote speech at Computex Taipei on June 2, 2024.

All of this happens for a reason: Nvidia has become the world's leading designer of AI chips, and Jensen Huang is at the forefront of that.

Earlier this week, Nvidia's market value surged past $3 trillion, and this makes it above Apple.

This makes Nvidia the second most valuable company in the world, coming only after Microsoft.

Shares of Nvidia are also up by more than 200% since 2023.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993, and was originally known for making the type of chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games.

But fast forward, the company's products gained more attention from the public, after many people realized that graphics processing units (GPUs) can also be a great in mining cryptocurrencies.

GPUs provide a higher hash rate (the speed at which they can process blocks and solve the cryptographic puzzles) compared to CPUs. This translates to more mining rewards in a shorter period.

The architecture of GPUs allows them to handle thousands of simultaneous threads, making them ideal for the repetitive and parallel nature of mining algorithms.

Initially, GPUs offered a better price-to-performance ratio compared to other mining hardware like ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits).

This made GPUs accessible for individual miners and small mining operations.

And just as with cryptocurrency mining, AI tasks like machine learning and deep learning benefit greatly from the parallel processing power of GPUs.

Nvidia's GPUs, with their ability to handle thousands of simultaneous operations, are ideal for training complex AI models.

Jensen Huang.
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang threw a ceremonial first pitch during Taiwanese Heritage Day before a baseball game in Oakland, California, before his flight to Taiwan.

With the rise of AI, and how tech companies have created an arms race where they rival in making their products superior, Nvidia's popularity goes no where but up.

After all, the 2022 launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI, which started this overall global generative AI race, was made possible by Nvidia chips.

The chatbot was trained using 10,000 of Nvidia's GPUs, clustered together in a supercomputer.

And as tech companies even publicly said that they're hoarding GPUs from Nvidia, Huang becomes the center of everything.

He becomes a centibillionaire, which means he has a net worth of over $100 billion.

So obviously, when Huang makes a visit to Taiwan, the country where he was born, and made comments that he is thinking about building another research and development center there, where many technology manufacturing have been going on, he sparked major interest.

Even the majors of the cities Huang mentioned, are trying to be in Huang's best interest.

"I want to tell you that I am very grateful that you made me and our company Nvidia feel very welcome in Taiwan. Taiwan is home to Nvidia's valuable partners," he said in English, before naming names such as TSMC and Foxconn.

During his visit, Huang frequently speaks Hokkien, which is a language closely related to those who fight for Taiwan's separated identity from China, although it is also used in China's Fujian province.

Jensen Huang.
Jensen Huang signing his autograph on a young woman's top, while she tucked her shirt up, just like a rock star.

In Silicon Valley, where Nvidia is based, sometimes he is recognized, but not always.

Sometimes, he is overshadowed by some of other tech leaders.

But when he attended events, he is often more than extraordinary.

Before this, Nvidia's last big conference was in San Jose, in a stadium. In the large city surrounded by rolling hills in Silicon Valley, a major technology hub in California's Bay Area, the event was jam-packed, with huge lines of people that struggle to get in.

It was like a concert.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even likened him to "Taylor Swift, but for tech."

Some analysts even refer to him as the "rock god of AI."