Nvidia’s technological prowess has lifted the chip giant to the impressive heights of the red-hot artificial intelligence space.
But a former employee provided important insight into CEO Jensen Huang’s management philosophy, which has also been crucial to the company’s stratospheric rise.
Rene Haas, CEO of British chip designer Arm, worked at Nvidia in the early 2010s and told the Financial times that Huang organized the company around projects rather than traditional hierarchies, giving him access to every layer of management and immediate answers.
“It’s a very unique culture,” Haas told the newspaper FT. “The advantage of this is transparency and speed. And I think that’s one of the things that Nvidia is really good at. They move very, very fast, they are very, very purposeful.”
That speed was on full display earlier this month, when Huang surprised Wall Street by presenting a rapid cadence of new AI platforms.
Last week he said Nvidia plans to upgrade its AI accelerators every year, when he announced the Blackwell Ultra chip for 2025 and a next-generation platform in development called Rubin for 2026.
Last week’s Computex trade show in Taiwan provided continued optimism about AI and the chip sector, briefly boosting Nvidia’s market capitalization to the $3 trillion mark for the first time. That capped an epic rally that has seen the company’s shares rise more than 3,100% in the past five years, and more than 200% in the past year alone.
In this process, Huang’s personal wealth has also increased enormously. On Friday, he surpassed Michael Dell to become the 13th richest person in the world with a net worth of $106.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
For his part, Huang – one of 22 CEOs who founded their Fortune 500 companies – has acknowledged that he is a demanding perfectionist and not easy to work for.
“That’s how it should be. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy,” he said 60 minutes in April.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
