Anyone who has watched a Harry Potter movie has seen the work of Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang. His company, Nvidia, made a chip called a graphics processing unit (GPU). The GPU makes possible the visual effects in movies such as Harry Potter and Avatar. The Taiwanese American’s ability to guess future trends gave him a place on Time magazine’s 2021 list of the 100 most influential people.
In 2003, Huang pushed Nvidia to design GPUs that do more than make visual effects. His decision was risky at the time. Now, the technology allows phones to answer questions in a human voice and farmers to spray weeds but not crops, for example. “Huang’s gamble paid off largely because he is among the world’s most technically savvy CEOs,” Andrew Ng, another technology leader, wrote in Time.
Huang is known as a caring employer, and he gives money to support education in science and technology. In 2008, for example, he gave Stanford University $30 million (€26 million) to build an engineering center.