Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, has been recognised for his "extraordinary vision and tireless execution", winning the semiconductor industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award -- in a first for the GPU specialist which has seen its stock soar 1,300%+ and 5,100%+, respectively, over the past five and 10 years.
Founded as a 3D graphics company before going on to become a premier graphics processing unit (GPU) specialist that has helped transform the gaming world, NVIDIA has also rapidly expanded into the enterprise and cloud data centre world, where its GPUs are increasingly used to help train deep neural networks, including for two of the fastest growing areas of AI; natural language understanding and deep recommendators.
(NVIDIA's data centre revenues topped $2 billion over the last quarter for the first time and as a reflection of the interest in the company's work, its GPU technology conference in April saw 200,000 registrants from 195 countries; CEO Huang's keynote alone seeing over 14 million views.)
See also: NVIDIA CEO: “Half the CPU cores in DCs are not running apps. That’s strange…”
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) presents the Noyce Award annually in recognition of a leader who has made outstanding contributions to the semiconductor industry in technology or public policy. Huang will accept the award at the SIA Awards Dinner on Nov. 18, 2021.
John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO said: “Jensen’s accomplishments have fueled countless innovations — from gaming to scientific computing to self-driving cars — and he continues to advance technologies that will transform our industry and the world", with the SIA adding in a release that its GPUs have "ignited modern AI... with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars."
Huang is a recipient of the IEEE Founder’s Medal, the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. In 2019, Harvard Business Review ranked him No. 1 on its list of the world’s 100 best-performing CEOs over the lifetime of their tenure. In 2017, he was named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year. Prior to founding NVIDIA, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. Huang holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.
Huang said in canned statement. “It has been the greatest joy and privilege to have grown up with the semiconductor and computer industries, two that so profoundly impact the world. As we enter the era of AI, robotics, digital biology, and the metaverse, we will see super-exponential technology advances."
"There’s never been a more exciting or important time to be in the semiconductor and computer industries.”
The Noyce Award is named in honor of semiconductor industry pioneer Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation. First awarded in 1991, its last three winners were AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su (2020), Robert H. Dennard, DRAM Inventor, Scaling Pioneer, and IBM Fellow Emeritus (2019) and John Hennessy, Alphabet Chairman and Former Stanford President (2018).
