My parents had nothing. Sold everything. Came to America. That was the beginning. Along the way, the jobs I had, the schools I went to, the opportunities I had, and here we are, Nvidia being the most consequential technology company in the world. This can't possibly happen anywhere else.
America leads the world in technological innovation. This innovation taking place all around us in Silicon Valley is possible here because of our American freedoms. But to take advantage of the opportunities that freedom affords us, it requires taking risk and facing the unknown with courage and determination.
Jensen Huang, the founding CEO of Nvidia, had a vision, took significant risk, and now leads an iconic American business, driving change at the heart of global technology.
His journey as an immigrant is fascinating, and it has so much to tell us about our country and what makes it exceptional.
America presented the opportunities that enabled Jensen's risk-taking to change the world.
Now for Only in America, my conversation with Jensen Huang.
The amazing Condoleezza Rice.
How are you? Good to see you.
What do you think about our new building?
I think this is amazing. This is a building that is only possible with science and a supercomputer, right? It's fantastic.
This was completely built in a simulation first.
This building is designed so that we make maximum use of this incredible space called California. And so we decided, let's use the space for the beautiful sunlight and the weather. And this entire space is very energy efficient. So we use the maximum amount of sunlight and that's why there are light wells on the roof.
But when you have light wells in the roof, it is extremely difficult to remove the heat.
And so notice where the triangles are, the light wells are only where it needs to be.
And the roof looks flat to us from here, but is undulated to track the sun. So it lets sun in just enough but doesn't let any more sunlight in than is needed. Otherwise, we'll have to remove the heat.
So hot. So it's completely efficient then.
Completely efficient. We simulated this building every single hour day, through a simulation of the entire year and we moved everything until it was perfect. Perfectly harmonious mathematically.
Well, I would expect that of you, Jensen.
That's an engineer trying to be an architect.
I like it. I like it. Yeah.
And the undulation, this one creates a baseball cap. And the reason for that is because you could see during the afternoon when the sun's about to set, it comes right into the building.
And so I sloped the walls to move the offices further back in. And so this is the baseball cap of the building and it fits right into the beautiful design.
If you make me look too put together, everybody knows it's fake.
I've got to be a little wiki wonky.
Something's got to be a little off.
You still call you Madam Secretary?
Uh, no. You're going to be good.
Would you like... I tell people or I'm good for now.
I tell people Madam Secretary was a while ago. Dr. Rice was my father and Professor Rice is with my students. So I think that leaves us with Connie.
My goodness, that's a lot of good titles.
Jensen Huang, thank you. Thank you for having me here at this beautiful Nvidia campus. You and I have known each other a very long time and have a lot of ties, Stanford ties and the like. So I'm really looking forward to our conversation, but let me start with this young kid, what, nine, comes to the United States of America. America is in many ways one big immigrant story. Very different stories but one big story of people who come seeking a better life, people who believe that their children are going to do better. So talk about arriving here. It couldn't have been easy.
I was born in Taiwan. When I was five, my father got a job in Thailand to help start an oil refinery. And so we moved to Thailand. We were there for about four years. In 1973 there was a coup as it happens every now and then. And my parents thought it was unsafe for us to be there. My older brother was one year older than me. He was 10. I was nine. My parents wanted to send us out as soon as possible. And so they got our uncle who lives in Tacoma, Washington, to take us for a little while. My first impression was I'd never stood in a house with carpets before. And it was the strangest feeling. I felt like I was walking on my bed with my shoes on and just everything, from cereal and the morning television, Speed Racer, and in the afternoon, Partridge Family, and all the candy, the Snickers bars, everything was like I couldn't imagine what this amazing country was and everything was so beautiful, the cars, everything was just incredible. And we were in Tacoma, Washington for about three months. And then they sent us to the most affordable, accessible boarding school in America because my parents couldn't afford much. A wonderful school. They welcomed students of all backgrounds. Many from difficult homes, some international kids and that's how we were able to come. They sponsored us and allowed us to come to the United States and stay in that boarding school and I was there for about two years in Oneida, Kentucky.
I have never heard of Oneida, Kentucky till this particular moment. If you look at Oneida, Kentucky in Google Maps, the beautiful thing is there's nothing around it.
It's just one little dot. I think when I was there it was probably population 600. It's probably population 600 now. Beautiful, incredible. I had a wonderful, wonderful childhood there. It was very difficult and very scary coming to the United States by yourself. But it's amazing what my older brother did. Frankly, I just followed him around. He was 10 years old. Could you imagine a 10-year-old bringing along a 9-year-old, traveled all the way from Thailand, never been to the United States, landed in Tacoma, Washington and went to Kentucky, but laid over in Chicago.
The Chicago airport is gigantic. And so we had to go find a connecting flight and a 10-year-old did all that by himself. My older brother's incredible.
Just amazing. So this was risky in a lot of ways, but your parents felt that the greater risk would be to stay where you were. How were you treated? Were people friendly? Were they surprised? How did that part of it go?
You know, 1973 United States, in Kentucky there were still biases and the school had never seen this Chinese kid before, right? Wonderful kids there, but none of them ever seen a Chinese before and so there were all of the things that comes along with being a stranger in a town where nobody's ever seen someone like you before. And so there's a lot of biases and of course things like that, but kids are kids. And so for us at the time, the United States was amazing and I was part of the swim team and I was part of the soccer team and the food was interesting, sausage and gravy. Who wouldn't like that? Hamburgers and after swim meet, the coach just took us to the most amazing restaurant in the world and the food came in boxes and the menu was all lit up and we sat in a restaurant that seemed like a spaceship and it was McDonald's.
And so I think it's really all about expectations in life. When you come from an even more difficult circumstance, that's the thing about immigrants, is that when you come to America, you came because of choice, you wanted to be here. My dad sent us here but in fact when I was four years old he had the opportunity to come to be trained in the United States and turned out the place he came to was New York. Could you imagine to come to the United States and it's New York City from Taiwan in the 60s. And so he always said that he wanted his family to eventually come to America to come to this incredible place. So the thing that's really great about immigrants is you came with very little expectation. You came with great hopes and dreams. You appreciate everything. You come with a sense of gratitude for where you are and the new opportunities.
Exactly. And this miracle that you're witnessing. I remember very clearly what it's like to see America for the first time, this miracle and all these people and how welcoming they are and to see it through those eyes. But then of course you go from this little kid in Kentucky, you're on the swim team, the soccer sounds like you were doing okay in.
I was a good athlete. Yeah, I was a good athlete. And so we met our parents back in Tacoma, Washington. They had nothing and literally they put all their belongings on the plane. So they had nothing and they came with, you know, literally the suitcase. I mean that story, the immigrant story, and they saved their way to build a life for their kids. My mom was a maid at a Catholic school. And my father was an engineer. They saved everything they had. My dad bought a green truck, a van, and there were no seats in it, so he put a carpet in the back and put some milk crates. We got into that green van and he drove us all the way from Oregon down to LA so that we could go see Disneyland. And that was the one vacation of our family.
How did you end up going on to college and then Stanford and working at Denny's which we have to cover at some point.
I know I must be Denny's best ambassador.
Yeah, I think you are definitely.
No, I love Denny's so much. It never occurred to me to be able to afford or go anywhere for college and so it was always just my plan that I would grow up in Oregon and I loved math. I loved science and when you're in high school and you love math and science you're only going to have three other friends who also love math and science. And so the two or three friends of ours, we were all in a club, we were in a math club. We were also in the science club, right? And then we were in the computer club all together. And so afterwards, after clubbing, we would go play arcade games, play pinball or go play arcade games. And that was growing up. And my best friend, Dean Verhiden, he said, you know, I'm just going to go to Oregon State University. My brother went there, my parents went there, and I said, that sounds great. Oregon State had a good engineering program. That was just good happenstance. I loved the school. And it turned out that there was another kid there, Lori. She was one of three girls in a class of 250 other boys, right? And she was, you know, I was the youngest kid in school. I was only 16. And she was a year and a half older than me and I was determined to go meet her. And so I statistically weeded out everybody by getting myself maneuvered into her lab class. So now I've reduced the competition from 250 to four.
That's very clever. That was very strategic even when I was a kid. And I knew odds and then I gave her the ultimate pickup line. I asked her if she wanted to see my homework.
That was so smooth and that was really smooth of you to do.
I cinched it and so we've been together ever since.
That's great. So that's when you met.
Yeah, we met. We've been in college.
So you're in Corvallis, Oregon State. You are doing well in school. How does Stanford come onto your radar screen?
I always wanted to go to a great school. You know, I always imagined getting a masters, but I never imagined that I could afford it. And so, during Oregon State, the recruiters came from Silicon Valley. And so I took a job at AMD and that was a really good choice because the work was really interesting. I had really great colleagues and they had a program where you could go to Stanford and work at AMD and they paid everything. And so when they were pitching the offer to me, I said, hang on a second. I can work at AMD. You're going to pay me a great salary and you're going to pay me to go to Stanford at the same time. And they said, yep. I said, that sounds like a dream come true. So I took that job. And then of course a year later, Lori graduated. We got married and then life started. So I took some classes, took some time off, took some classes, took some time off and altogether it must have taken me some eight years to graduate. I'm probably the longest running student at Stanford. Nobody paid Stanford more. I just for the education and along the way, Spencer Madison came and along the way I founded Nvidia and literally during my entire tenure, during that time of being at Stanford, my life happened.
Yeah. When you're going to school, you think that this school work is awfully academic. And the reason for that is because you're not sure whether there's any purpose and any benefit in learning this, but the benefit of working and going to school at the same time, especially Stanford. I could see so much of the principles being taught and how important it is in everything that I do today. And so it was a great privilege to have all of that happening to me at the same time. My family, my kids, my company, Stanford, working, all of it kind of in one giant soup.
People talk about Silicon Valley and the ecosystem and so forth. But you just used a really great term. It is really kind of a big stew, is it? And you meet very interesting people and they change your thinking about something and that leads to something. It sounds like Stanford was a place like that for you.
It completely shaped my attitude and my perspective about computer science and its impact to industry and industrial strategies. That entire intersection between technology applications, the fundamental science and the strategies of computer science really for me formulated during that time.
Now talk about the founding of Nvidia. The early day founder stories are really fascinating because you have to take a chance. You take a risk. You don't know if it's going to work out. But what was the kernel that made you and your co-founders think maybe we have something here during that time?
