He Cleaned Toilets at Nine. Then He Built the Most Valuable Company in the World.

His parents made a decision no parent should have to make.

Jensen Huang was nine years old, living in Bangkok, when a military coup made the streets feel dangerous again. His parents were not wealthy. They had no connections in America, no relatives who could take the boys in. What they had was an uncle in Tacoma, Washington -a man they had never visited -and a belief that their children's future was worth the risk of sending them away.

They contacted the uncle. He found a school that would accept two foreign boys with almost no savings.

It was Oneida Baptist Institute in rural Kentucky.

The campus was spare. The students were rough. Senior boys were assigned farming on the tobacco fields that funded the school. Jensen was too young for that -he was the youngest student on campus -so he was given a different job.

He cleaned the bathrooms.

Every day. For a hundred teenage boys who, he has joked, were not always careful about their aim. His roommate was seventeen, covered in tattoos and scarring from a recent fight, and was known as the toughest kid in the school. Jensen taught him to read. In exchange, he was taught how to bench press.

"You can't unsee that kind of stuff," he has said. "But that was my job and so I did it delightfully."

He has said this about that period -the bullying, the loneliness, the bathrooms, the Kentucky winters -that his memories of it are mostly good. That cheerfulness, that refusal to let conditions define the moment, runs through everything he has done since.

His family eventually settled in Oregon. He worked graveyard shifts at a Denny's starting at fifteen -dishwasher first, then busboy, then waiter. He was paid $2.65 an hour. He wanted to be excellent at it. "Just everything that I was doing," he has said, "I wanted to do the best I could." He applied his boarding school experience to the role, claiming he became "definitely the best bathroom cleaner the world's ever seen."

He went to Oregon State. Then Stanford for a master's. Then microchip design in Silicon Valley, where he learned the industry from the inside, watching the way silicon and software were beginning to make the world.

In 1993, on his thirtieth birthday, he sat in a booth at a Denny's in San Jose with two colleagues -the same chain where he had once earned $2.65 an hour -and they founded NVIDIA.

They had $40,000. The name came from invidia -the Latin word for envy. They wanted competitors to turn green with it.

The founding happened over cheap coffee in a diner. Jensen chose it because it was quieter than home. But also because he knew it. He had worked there. No table was beneath him.

For over a decade, NVIDIA made graphics chips for video games. Good business. Not world-altering. Then, starting around 2006, something shifted. Machine learning researchers discovered that the parallel processing architecture inside NVIDIA's chips -designed for rendering complex graphics -was extraordinarily efficient for training neural networks.

Jensen did not react to this discovery. He accelerated it.

He launched CUDA -a software platform that allowed developers to write code for GPU-based computing. When he unveiled it, the audience was silence. Nobody wanted it. Nobody understood it. The company's valuation fell from $12 billion to roughly $2 billion.

He kept going.

In 2016, he drove a $300,000 AI supercomputer to San Francisco himself, in his car, and walked it up to a small upstairs room where a group of researchers were working. The room turned out to be OpenAI, before anyone knew what OpenAI was.

By 2024, NVIDIA had crossed $3 trillion in market capitalisation -briefly the most valuable company in the world. Jensen Huang's personal net worth exceeded $130 billion. He had built the infrastructure on which the artificial intelligence revolution runs.

In September 2023, he returned to the Denny's on Berryessa Road in San Jose. He sat in a booth. He ordered seven items. He told the waitress he had once been a dishwasher at a Denny's. He tipped her a thousand dollars. Then he and Denny's unveiled a plaque marking the booth where NVIDIA's journey began -and he announced a competition to find the next big idea.

"To me, no task is beneath me," he told Stanford business students. "Because remember, I used to wash dishes. I used to clean toilets. I've cleaned more toilets than all of you combined. That's life."

He was sent away at nine with almost nothing. He cleaned the bathrooms. He washed the dishes. He built the company the AI revolution runs on.

He went back to put a plaque on the booth.

May the day break!