Nvidia’s technical strength has elevated the chip giant to the commanding heights of the hot artificial intelligence field.
But one former employee offers important insights into CEO Jensen Huang’s management philosophy, which has been key to the company’s meteoric rise.
Rene Haas, chief executive of British chip design company Arm, who worked at Nvidia in the early 2010s, told the Wall Street Journal Financial Times Huang organized the company around projects rather than traditional hierarchies, which allowed him to visit any level of management and get answers directly.
“It’s a very unique culture,” Haas told the outlet Financial Times. “The benefit of this is transparency and speed. I think that’s one of the things that Nvidia is very, very good at. They move very, very fast and their goals are very, very clear.
That speed was on full display earlier this month when Huang stunned Wall Street with the rapid rollout of a new artificial intelligence platform.
Last week, he said that Nvidia plans to upgrade its artificial intelligence accelerator every year, and announced that it will launch Blackwell Ultra chips in 2025 and launch the next-generation platform Rubin under development in 2026.
The Computex trade show held in Taiwan last week fueled continued bullish sentiment on the artificial intelligence and chip industries, helping Nvidia’s market value exceed the $3 trillion mark for the first time. This has sent the company’s stock price soaring more than 3,100% over the past five years and more than 200% in the last year alone.
In the process, Huang’s personal wealth also surged. On Friday, he surpassed Michael Dell to become the world’s 13th richest person, with a net worth of $106.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Huang, one of 22 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, admits that he is a demanding perfectionist and that working for him is not easy.
“That’s how it should be. If you want to do something extraordinary, it shouldn’t be easy,” he told 60 minutes in April.
