Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said he “had no idea how” to start a business when he co-founded the computer chip company from a Denny’s booth in 1993. His lack of experience didn’t stop him from making history by building Nvidia into the world’s first $5 trillion company, a benchmark it achieved on Wednesday.
The tech giant’s stock rose by 3% on Wednesday, closing with a record market value of $5.03 trillion, following Huang’s Tuesday announcement of plans to build a series of supercomputers for the U.S. government. In the announcement, Huang forecasted an additional $500 billion in orders for Nvidia’s AI chips.
Nvidia’s stock is up nearly 50% since the start of 2025, reflecting investors’ enthusiasm for an artificial intelligence boom that’s seen Huang’s Santa Clara, California-based company explode into an industry behemoth, from a relatively small video game processor manufacturer.
It’s been a dizzying ascent for a company that only first reached a $100 billion valuation in July 2017, and overcame significant early struggles that nearly put it out of business in the mid-1990s.
Huang was a 30-year-old engineer at Sun Microsystems in 1993 when he gathered with friends and future co-founders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in a booth at a Denny’s diner to plot what would become Nvidia. “Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, nor did they. None of us knew how to do anything,” Huang told CBS’ “60 Minutes” about the company’s origins in an April 2024 interview.
