Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rakes in another $30 billion in personal wealth as stock skyrockets amid AI GPU frenzy

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He's worth $43.5 billion now.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's compensation
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's stock price this year has increased massively in value, and that's made Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of Nvidia, a much richer man than ever before (via Business Insider). Worth roughly $14 billion at the start of 2023, Huang is now worth nearly $44 billion thanks to his ownership of many Nvidia shares, and he is now the world's 27th richest person. Nvidia makes many of the best graphics cards, but the latest surge has more to do with AI than gaming GPUs.

Huang was already worth quite a bit in 2020 and 2021, when Nvidia's stock rallied due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2022 however saw a broad decline in stock prices, especially for tech companies like Nvidia. After hitting a peak of $326 on November 30 in 2021, Nvidia's stock price crashed to $121 on September 30 in 2022.

However, this year has seen Nvidia's stock price skyrocket, and at the time of writing it is now 237% more valuable than it was on January 1 of this year. It's all thanks to the hype around AI and what it can do commercially. Nvidia was already a leader in AI before this year thanks to its Tensor cores and AI software, and so it's hardly surprising that Nvidia is the key beneficiary of this investing spree.

Although the stock market isn't always right about the value of stocks, it's clear why investors love Nvidia so much. The company hit over $13 billion in revenue in Q2 of this year, beating the previous record of $8 billion. $10 billion of that revenue came solely from the company's data center segment thanks to the recent surge in demand for AI hardware. This is far more money than Nvidia has ever made in a single quarter from gaming GPU sales.

Nvidia isn't the only tech company getting a stock boost from AI, though. AMD's stock price has risen 81% since the beginning of the year, Microsoft's has increased 54%, Meta shares are up 175%, and even Intel's stock, which has performed very poorly recently, is up 63%.

Of course, if Huang doesn't sell his stock in his own tech company, his net worth will continue to be tied to Nvidia's stock price. That means if investors lose confidence in the commercial viability of AI or fear that AI stocks are overvalued, then Huang's fortune could see a big plummet alongside Nvidia's stock price. Recently, Nvidia has had to face restrictions on export of many of its top GPUs to China and other countries, which could impact the bottom line. The company is announcing its Q3 financial results after the market closes today, and if investors don't like what they see, that alone could cause a significant decline.

Still, even when the stock market was at its worse in 2022, Huang was worth roughly $13 billion, which is certainly more than enough for a cozy retirement.

Matthew Connatser
Matthew Connatser

Matthew Connatser is a freelancing writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes articles about CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and computers in general.

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9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • BX4096
    Turns out you can make a lot of money off a ridiculously overpriced monopoly. Who knew?

    Personally, after extensively testing 4070 TI and 4090 from their current line-up, I'd rather drink bleach than pay retail prices on either of these two. The $800-priced TI was a total disappointment (can't even imagine the levels of buyer's regret non-TI owners must be going through), and while 4090 may be a decent enough card on itself, it's nowhere as powerful or big of a must-have as some claim to justify spending thousands(!) on a mere GPU.

    But hey, it's always nice to see rubes getting hyped up on sheer marketing and making another 1%-er even richer. Means everything is right with the world. Keep it up.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    I'm not going to support Nvidia's price gouging, hence the reason why I went with AMD and I will continue to go with AMD until Nvidia comes to their senses and makes reasonably priced GPUs again.
    Reply
  • BX4096
    Order 66 said:
    I'm not going to support Nvidia's price gouging, hence the reason why I went with AMD and I will continue to go with AMD until Nvidia comes to their senses and makes reasonably priced GPUs again.
    With so much free money flowing in, why would they ever? Unless the lackluster competition somehow comes up with a truly great line-up that forces them to adjust, I say there are better chances of Huang hiring someone to "execute Order 66" instead.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    BX4096 said:
    With so much free money flowing in, why would they ever? Unless the lackluster competition somehow comes up with a truly great line-up that forces them to adjust, I say there are better chances of Huang hiring someone to "execute Order 66" instead.
    I see what you did there. :) AMD doesn't even need to necessarily compete with Nvidia, they just need to release cards that offer decent performance with a value that nvidia can't match. Sort of like Intel I guess.
    Reply
  • BX4096
    Order 66 said:
    I see what you did there. :) AMD doesn't even need to necessarily compete with Nvidia, they just need to release cards that offer decent performance with a value that nvidia can't match. Sort of like Intel I guess.
    Well, AMD really fumbled it this round. They could have turned it to their advantage and gained a lot of market share (and future loyal customers) with their 7000 series last year. Instead, they decided to follow NVIDIA's unabashed price gouging, forgetting that given two fairly similar choices most people will always pick the safe known bet.

    Yes, the new AMD cards are superior in most practical respects (having more VRAM and this decade's connectors like DisplayPort 2.1 is a good example) , but NVIDIA has a de-facto monopoly and built a lot of hype around its advantages like DLSS, CUDA, and ray tracing. You don't fight something like this with tiny competitive discounts. You lower your pricing as fast as you can and as much as you possibly can to gain market share, and once the customers flock and realize that they don't really need CUDA and ray tracing to play Minesweeper, you start adjusting your pricing and strategy for long time profit.
    Reply
  • ManDaddio
    BX4096 said:
    Well, AMD really fumbled it this round. They could have turned it to their advantage and gained a lot of market share (and future loyal customers) with their 7000 series last year. Instead, they decided to follow NVIDIA's unabashed price gouging, forgetting that given two fairly similar choices most people will always pick the safe known bet.

    Yes, the new AMD cards are superior in most practical respects (having more VRAM and this decade's connectors like DisplayPort 2.1 is a good example) , but NVIDIA has a de-facto monopoly and built a lot of hype around its advantages like DLSS, CUDA, and ray tracing. You don't fight something like this with tiny competitive discounts. You lower your pricing as fast as you can and as much as you possibly can to gain market share, and once the customers flock and realize that they don't really need CUDA and ray tracing to play Minesweeper, you start adjusting your pricing and strategy for long time profit.
    Yeah people are running out to buy discrete GPUs to play games like minesweeper. I understand the point you are making but you insult people at the same time.

    If most gamers only cared about raw raster then they wouldn't be buying NVIDIA. Features sell. And NVIDIA features offer added value. Fact.
    Reply
  • BX4096
    ManDaddio said:
    Yeah people are running out to buy discrete GPUs to play games like minesweeper. I understand the point you are making but you insult people at the same time.

    If most gamers only cared about raw raster then they wouldn't be buying NVIDIA. Features sell. And NVIDIA features offer added value. Fact.
    It was a joke, not an insult. But to address the issue, probably something like 99.9% of people who play games play stuff that doesn't even require these NVIDIA features and are neither visually different or run any noticeably slower on AMD hardware.

    See the 100 most played games on Steam and tell me how many of them would benefit even slightly from CUDA over OpenGL, higher ray tracing FPS, or even DLSS over FRS - even the game does support it. Most people buy stuff without going into specifics, and when they hear something like "ray tracing is a new feature that looks good" and that "NVIDIA is faster in ray tracing", that's pretty much enough for them to justify the slight price increase. The vast majority of customers doesn't go into deep research to see if the game they want to play, most likely an older one from their backlog, even supports either of these features or needs a high-end card.

    So it's not the features that really sell, but the hype. And that's coming from a lifelong NVIDIA owner, by the way.
    Reply
  • HaninTH
    BX4096 said:
    So it's not the features that really sell, but the hype. And that's coming from a lifelong NVIDIA owner, by the way.

    I am glad I'm not the only one that can't understand why people are allowing themselves to be conned into buying these egregiously priced GPUs. All of the PC games I play neither care nor would they run any faster with one brand over the other. I tend to turn off a lot of the "extras" as they're more suited to movies than gameplay (motion blur in games is silly!).

    Is it just hype or is there a broader conspiracy at play... :alien:
    Reply
  • BX4096
    HaninTH said:
    I am glad I'm not the only one that can't understand why people are allowing themselves to be conned into buying these egregiously priced GPUs. All of the PC games I play neither care nor would they run any faster with one brand over the other. I tend to turn off a lot of the "extras" as they're more suited to movies than gameplay (motion blur in games is silly!).
    And to be fair, I'm not saying that something like faster RT is a useless feature. Not at all. I'm saying that most people who buy stuff – and that goes double for overpriced, trendy stuff like high-end GPUs – are much more guided by peer pressure and marketing hype in their search of new and shiny than the basics that will actually matter in their everyday use. Having a lot of video memory all the time even while having noticeably slow ray tracing in some games some of the time is generally a much preferable alternative to having low VRAM and fast ray tracing at the same price point, unless we're talking very specific usage scenarios here.

    To give a better example of this, just look back a bit. How many of those who got the first RTX cards back in 2018 with their "world’s first real-time ray tracing" bought it because it was an objectively useful feature and got their money's worth out of it before the next generation came out? Out of the handful of games that even supported it back then, how many were most played? And out of those, how many were actually playable with RT on and maxed out graphics settings on those early RTX GPUs? If you bought an RTX 2060 over a similarly priced alternative with faster rasterization and more VRAM simply because of its ray tracing feature, you weren't really buying a feature. You were buying into the hype. I've done a lot of similarly silly or impractical stuff myself when I was younger, so I'm talking from experience here.
    Reply