Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth swells from $3 billion to $90 billion in five years
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 19, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Five years ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang owned a stake in his chipmaker worth roughly $3 billion. After Thursday’s rally, which pushed the stock to a record, his holdings now stand at more than $90 billion.
Nvidia late Wednesday reported first-quarter earnings that topped estimates, with sales jumping more than 200% for a third straight quarter, driven by demand for artificial intelligence processors.
Huang also delivered a better-than-expected forecast and indicated to investors that the company sees insatiable demand for its AI graphics processing units, or GPUs. The company signaled its customers, especially the big cloud companies, could get a strong return on their investment in the pricey chips.
“We are fundamentally changing how computing works and what computers can do,” Huang said.
Huang owns about 86.76 million shares of Nvidia, or more than 3.5% of the company’s outstanding shares. With the stock rising over 9% to close at a price of nearly $1,038 per share on Thursday, the value of his stake rose by about $7.7 billion.
Nvidia shares have more than doubled this year after tripling in 2023. They are up about 28-fold in the past five years. Huang added shares to his stake in 2022, when the stock hit relative lows before the AI boom.
Huang, 61, founded the Silicon Valley company in 1993 to build GPUs for 3D gaming. While gaming was the company’s biggest business for decades, Nvidia has dipped into other markets, including cloud gaming subscriptions, the metaverse and cryptocurrency mining chips.
But Nvidia’s fortunes shifted dramatically in late 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, opening up the concept of generative AI to the broader public. The technology showcased a future in which computers won’t just retrieve new information from databases, but can also generate new content and answers to questions from large caches of unsorted data.
OpenAI does most of its AI development on Nvidia GPUs. As other companies such as Microsoft, Google and Meta bolstered their investments in AI research and development, they needed billions of dollars worth of the latest AI chips to build out their models.
Huang has been the face of Nvidia and its principal salesperson, constantly extolling the potential and power of using the company’s GPUs for building AI.
Nvidia, which has been developing AI software and tools for more than a decade, ended up in prime position to become the top supplier to the biggest technology companies. The company now has about 80% of the market for AI chips, and Huang is among the 20 richest people in the world.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images
Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.
Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:
- Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
- Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected
Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”
Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.
CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.
“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.
Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.
For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.
Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.
Okta shares have gained about 4% this year.
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Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.
The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.
Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.
The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.
Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.
Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.
Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.
Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.
“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.
Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.
On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.
Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”
The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.
In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.
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