The CEO of the world’s most valuable company didn’t learn about the United States through elite universities or technology incubators. His education began at a rural boarding school in Kentucky where students smoked, carried knives and the youngest student on campus, at age 9, was in charge of cleaning the bathrooms.
That student was Jensen Huang.
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In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the Nvidia CEO went back to those unlikely beginnings and attributed it to his parents, who had sent him and his brother to the United States in the mid-1970s with virtually nothing.
The family lived in Bangkok during one of Thailand’s recurring coups d’état, and their parents decided it was no longer safe to keep the children there.
They contacted an uncle they had never visited in Tacoma, Washington, and asked him to find a school in the United States that would accept two foreign boys with almost no savings.
He found one: Oneida Baptist Institute in Clay County, Kentucky, one of the poorest in the country at the time — and still is today. The dorms had no closet doors, no locks, and housed a group of teenagers who smoked all the time — Huang said he also tried smoking for a week, at age 9 — and resolved fights with knives.
Huang’s roommate was a 17-year-old wrapped in ribbons from a recent fight; “the toughest kid in school”, as he said.
Every student had a job. His brother was sent to the tobacco fields the school maintained to support himself — “almost like a penitentiary” — while Huang became the janitor, cleaning the bathrooms used by a hundred teenagers (“I just wish they were a little more careful” in the bathroom, he joked).
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This relentlessly good-natured disposition, even when describing scenes that would seem brutal to almost anyone else, ran through the entire interview.
Huang said most of his memories from that period were good, and recalled the time he told his parents about his amazement after eating at a restaurant: “Mom and Dad, we went to the most amazing restaurant today. The whole place is lit up. It looks like the future. And the food comes in a box, and the food is amazing. The burger is amazing.”
“It was McDonald’s,” Huang said, laughing.
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In fact, these memories were only passed on to parents later; the boys were dealing with all of this on their own. International calls were too expensive, so their parents bought them a simple recorder.
Once a month, the boys recorded an audio letter about life in the coal region and sent the tape to Bangkok. Parents would record over the same tape and send it back.
Two years later, Huang’s parents finally arrived in the United States, with just suitcases and a little money. His mother worked as a maid.
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His father, a trained engineer, looked for work by posting vacancies in the newspaper’s classifieds and calling whoever would answer. He ended up getting a job at an engineering consultancy designing factories and refineries.
“They left everything behind,” Huang said. “They started again when they were almost 40.”
He still carries a memory of those early years that he says breaks his heart. Shortly after his parents arrived in the country, the family was living in a furnished rented apartment when he and his brother accidentally broke a flimsy pressed wood coffee table.
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“I still remember the look on my mother’s face,” he said. “They didn’t have any money, and she had no idea how she was going to pay for it.”
For Huang, moments like these define the size of the risk his parents accepted by going to the United States “with almost no money.”
“My parents are amazing,” he said. “It’s hard not to love this country. It’s hard not to be romantic about this country.”
Huang’s Humble Beginnings Inspired Nvidia
This way of seeing America — as a place where people will give you a chance if you’re willing to take it — is how Huang explains Nvidia’s early, unlikely bets.
Huang came up with the idea for Nvidia sitting at a table at the fast food restaurant Denny’s, where he worked first as a dishwasher and then as a busboy.
He wanted to build a chip capable of running 3D graphics on a personal computer, and it was at that table at Denny’s that he met with two friends to sketch out what would become the company.
Long before the company became synonymous with the AI boom, Huang continued to steer it toward ideas that few people understood and even fewer believed in.
The Cuda computing platform was one of them. When Nvidia launched the system in 2006, the cost of the chip practically doubled, revenue didn’t budge, and the company’s market value fell from about $12 billion to $2 billion and $3 billion.
“When I launched the Cuda, the reaction was absolute silence,” he said. “Nobody wanted it. Nobody asked for it. Nobody understood it.”
Cuda is the software layer that turns graphics chips into general-purpose computing engines, allowing them to power large neural networks. Now, of course, virtually all major AI models run on hardware that relies on Cuda.
The same happened when he introduced Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer, the DGX-1. The launch generated “complete silence,” he said, and there were no purchase orders.
The only person who got in touch was none other than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who told him he had “a non-profit AI lab” that needed a system like that.
Huang assumed the deal would be impossible.
“All the blood is gone from my face,” he told Rogan. “A nonprofit is not going to buy a $300,000 computer.”
But Musk, the richest man in the world, insisted. So Huang boxed up one of the first units, put it in his car, and drove to San Francisco himself.
In 2016, he walked into a small upstairs room packed with researchers—Berkeley robotics pioneer Pieter Abbeel, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and others—working in a cramped office.
That space would eventually turn out to be OpenAI, long before it became the most talked about AI organization in the world. Huang left the DGX-1 with them and returned home.
Looking back, even as CEO of a $4.5 trillion company that now draws crowds and autograph seekers wherever he goes, he doesn’t describe any of this as strategic vision or heroism.
For him, everything is a continuation of the risks his parents took in sending two boys across the world with almost nothing.
“We really believed in this, and if you believe in this future and don’t do anything about it, you will regret it for the rest of your life,” Huang said.
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