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.
CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., July 15, 2025.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
It’s been a tough November for Palantir.
Shares of the software analytics provider dropped 16% for their worst month since August 2023 as investors dumped AI stocks due to valuation fears. Meanwhile, famed investor Michael Burry doubled down on the artificial intelligence trade and bet against the company.
Palantir started November off on a high note.
The Denver-based company topped Wall Street’s third-quarter earnings and revenue expectations. Palantir also posted its second-straight $1 billion revenue quarter, but high valuation concerns contributed to a post-print selloff.
In a note to clients, Jefferies analysts called Palantir’s valuation “extreme” and argued investors would find better risk-reward in AI names such as Microsoft and Snowflake. Analysts at RBC Capital Markets raised concerns about the company’s “increasingly concentrated growth profile,” while Deutsche Bank called the valuation “very difficult to wrap our heads around.”
Adding fuel to the post-earnings selloff was the revelation that Burry is betting against Palantir and AI chipmaker Nvidia. Burry, who is widely known for predicting the housing crisis that occurred in 2008 and the portrayal of him in the film “The Big Short,” later accused hyperscalers of artificially boosting earnings.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp vocally hit the front lines, appearing twice in one week on CNBC, where he accused Burry of “market manipulation” and called the investor’s actions “egregious.”
“The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is bats— crazy,” Karp told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Despite the vicious selloff, Palantir has notched some deal wins this month. That included a multiyear contract with consulting firm PwC to speed up AI adoption in the U.K. and a deal with aircraft engine maintenance company FTAI.
But those announcements did little to shake off valuation worries that have haunted all AI-tied companies in November.
Across the board, investors have viciously ditched the high-priced group, citing fears of stretched valuations and a bubble.
In November, Nvidia pulled back more than 12%, while Microsoft and Amazon dropped about 5% each. Quantum computing names such as Rigetti Computing and D-Wave Quantum have shed more than a third of their value.
Apple and Alphabet were the only Magnificent 7 stocks to end the month with gains.
Sill, questions linger over Palantir’s valuation, and those worries aren’t a new concern.
Even after its steep price drop, the company’s stock trades at 233 times forward earnings. By comparison, Nvidia and Alphabet traded at about 38 times and 30 times, respectively, at Friday’s close.
Karp, who has long defended the company, didn’t miss an opportunity to clap back at his critics, arguing in a letter to shareholders that the company is making it feasible for everyday investors to attain rates of return once “limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto.”
“Please turn on the conventional television and see how unhappy those that didn’t invest in us are,” Karp said during an earnings call. “Enjoy, get some popcorn. They’re crying. We are every day making this company better, and we’re doing it for this nation, for allied countries.”
Palantir declined to comment for this story.
WATCH: Palantir CEO Alex Karp: We’ve printed venture results for the average American
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment3 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024