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The two faces of Jensen Huang
Behind Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s warm public persona lies a hard-driving strategist whose leadership style and ambitions carry major implications for Korea’s tech industry.
Suh Kyoung-ho
The author is an editorial writer of the JoongAng Ilbo.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang drew intense attention during his recent visit to Korea. Interest in his movements became so great that internet users even created a website tracking his itinerary and related stocks. As he did during his famous gathering over chicken and beer with Korea’s conglomerate leaders in October last year, Huang again presented a friendly public image, handing out snacks and greeting people with ease.
One memorable scene was the awkward expression of a business group chairman standing beside him to help distribute snacks. It was probably not something he did every day. Thanks to Huang, the public got a rare glimpse of major corporate leaders grilling meat and sharing drinks in ordinary restaurants.
Many people view Huang as a generous and approachable businessman. Yet a closer look at Nvidia’s history suggests a more complicated figure.
Since co-founding Nvidia in 1993, Huang has remained the company’s sole CEO for more than three decades, making him the longest-serving chief executive among technology companies in the S&P 500. Inside Nvidia, he was often regarded as a fearsome presence, sometimes compared to Darth Vader from Star Wars.
According to "The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip" (2024) by Stephen Witt, Huang frequently expressed anger and harshly criticized employees. Within the company, these episodes became known as “Huang’s fury.” Such criticism was often delivered publicly. Huang explained that openly discussing mistakes helped the organization learn from failure, but some employees reportedly viewed the practice as verbal abuse. On one occasion, he asked an employee about years of service and salary before suggesting the person return all compensation earned to that point. Dozens of executives witnessed the exchange. In today’s workplace environment, such behavior would likely trigger controversy.
Huang shares several traits with Elon Musk. Both are immigrant engineers, workaholics and demanding leaders known for raising their voices. One major difference, however, is that Huang rarely dismisses employees.
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His leadership has always combined long-term vision with extraordinary persistence. A phrase he frequently repeated in meetings was “O.I.A.L.O.,” short for “Once in a Lifetime Opportunity.” He ultimately found such an opportunity in two technologies that many regarded as unlikely to succeed: parallel computing and neural networks.
Parallel computing enabled immense computing power without relying exclusively on traditional supercomputers. Neural-network development helped lay the foundation for the artificial intelligence era. Nvidia introduced the world’s first GPU in 1999 and released CUDA, a software platform allowing researchers and developers to harness computing power, in 2007. After 2013, the company increasingly transformed itself into an AI-focused enterprise.
It was around that time that Huang’s trademark leather jacket became part of his public image, reportedly following advice from his daughter Madison. Last year, Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization.
Nvidia’s recent strategy resembles the Chinese concept of hiding one’s strength while waiting for the right moment. In 2023, Huang described Nvidia’s relationship with Intel as similar to Tom and Jerry.
“We do not compete with Intel,” he said. “When Intel gets close, I grab my chips and run away.”
Earlier this month in Taiwan, however, Huang unveiled RTX Spark, a next-generation AI laptop chip that combines a CPU and the Blackwell GPU. Because agentic AI can run directly on the chip, analysts described it as a significant step toward the AI PC era. Shares of established competitors, including Intel, fell after the announcement.
On Monday, Nvidia and several Korean companies announced plans to cooperate on projects including the construction of next-generation AI data centers, or “AI factories,” in Korea. Recognition of Korea’s strengths in manufacturing and physical AI is encouraging.
The more important question is what comes next.
Huang is a disciplined strategist who will closely examine the competitiveness of Korea’s manufacturing industries, including semiconductors. If Korean companies hope to avoid becoming dependent on Nvidia’s AI platform, they must preserve overwhelming technological advantages of their own.
They will need to sharpen their capabilities continuously, just as Huang spent more than three decades pushing both himself and Nvidia beyond their perceived limits.
